What is Hosting Plan Fit Score?
A hosting plan quiz recommends shared, VPS, or dedicated hosting based on traffic volume, technical requirements, budget, and growth plans.
The Formula
Score = (Performance Fit + Budget Fit + Scalability + Support Level) ÷ 4
Worked Example
A growing ecommerce site: 50K monthly visitors, WooCommerce, $50/month budget, expecting 2x growth.
- Shared: performance poor at 50K, budget great, no scalability = 45%
- Managed VPS: performance good, $40-60/month, scalable = 85%
- Dedicated: overkill performance, $150+/month over budget = 55%
- Cloud (AWS/GCP): performance great, variable cost, complex = 70%
📌 Managed VPS scores 85%, right balance of performance, cost, and scalability for a growing ecommerce site.
Why This Matters
Site speed
40% of visitors leave if a page takes over 3 seconds according to Google PageSpeed research. The right hosting ensures sub-2-second load times. Portent analysis shows that ecommerce sites loading in 1 second convert at 2.5% while those loading in 5 seconds convert at only 0.7%, a 72% conversion gap driven almost entirely by hosting and infrastructure quality.
Revenue protection
Each hour of downtime costs ecommerce sites $1,000-10,000. Reliable hosting is a revenue insurance policy. Uptime Robot monitoring data across 10,000 sites shows that shared hosting plans average 99.5% uptime (43 hours downtime per year) versus 99.95% for managed VPS (4.4 hours per year), a 10x reliability gap that pays for the upgrade in avoided downtime revenue alone.
Growth accommodation
Hosting that cannot scale forces emergency migration during traffic spikes, the worst possible time to migrate. Review Signal's annual web hosting performance benchmarks show that shared hosting plans fail load tests at 1,000 concurrent users in 78% of cases, while managed cloud hosting handles the same load without degradation, making scalability a day-one consideration for any site with growth ambitions.
Common Mistakes
❌ Starting too cheap
$3/month shared hosting is fine for blogs but kills ecommerce conversion. Invest $30-60/month minimum for commercial sites. Review Signal's benchmark testing shows that budget shared hosting delivers median time-to-first-byte (TTFB) of 1.8-3.2 seconds versus 0.3-0.6 seconds for quality managed VPS, a 5x difference that translates directly to conversion rate and Core Web Vitals scores.
❌ Over-provisioning
A $200/month dedicated server for a 5K visitor site wastes $150+/month. Match hosting to actual needs. Kinsta's hosting cost analysis shows that a properly right-sized managed WordPress hosting plan handles up to 25,000 monthly visitors for under $35/month, and moving to a plan four tiers above what traffic justifies typically adds zero performance benefit while tripling monthly costs.
❌ Ignoring managed services
Self-managing servers costs 10-20 hours monthly in admin time. Managed hosting costs more but frees developer time. WP Engine's customer research shows that developers on managed hosting ship new features 3 weeks faster per quarter than those managing their own infrastructure, because unplanned maintenance interruptions are reduced from an average of 8 hours per month to under 1 hour.
Industry Benchmarks
| Category | Good | Average | Poor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 10K visitors | Quality shared ($10-20) | Budget shared ($3-5) | Free hosting |
| 10-100K visitors | Managed VPS ($30-80) | Premium shared | Budget shared |
| 100K+ visitors | Cloud/Dedicated ($100+) | VPS | Shared (crashes) |
Source: Review Signal Web Hosting Performance Benchmarks 2025
Benchmark data sourced from Review Signal Web Hosting Performance Benchmarks 2025.