Most hosting advice starts with a comparison table. That is the wrong end of the problem. The table only means something once you know which constraint you are actually buying against — and for a SaaS side project that constraint is almost never the monthly price.
This guide works through the decision in the order that matters, and ends with the specific products that fit each answer.
The single question that removes most of the market:
Write down the number. Not a feeling — a number.
⚠️ Most side projects sit in the first bucket and buy for the third. That is the most common and most expensive mistake in this decision — paying managed-hosting prices to protect revenue that does not exist yet.
This is a real trade and it is usually decided by taste rather than by budget.
Read how the plan is metered before you read the price. Metered visits, metered bandwidth, and metered build minutes all turn a fixed cost into a variable one, and the variance arrives exactly when something goes well. A fixed-resource VPS costs more on a quiet month and saves you from a surprise on a good one.
If your users are in the EU and you handle personal data, the location of the servers and the provider's sub-processor list are a compliance question, not a latency question. Check it before migration, not after.
Ask how you would leave before you arrive. Standard stack on a plain VPS: trivial. Proprietary build pipeline with platform-specific config: expensive. The cost of leaving is part of the price of joining, and it is never on the pricing page.
Abstract advice is easy to agree with and hard to act on. Here is the same project — a small SaaS with a WordPress marketing site, a Django application, a Postgres database, and roughly 8,000 visits a month — priced across the four categories at September 2026 rates.
Cost: around $4/month. Also: impossible. Shared hosting will run the WordPress site and nothing else. The Django application has nowhere to live. This option only exists to be eliminated, and it is worth eliminating explicitly because a surprising number of people start here and then spend a fortnight trying to make it work.
A 2 vCPU / 4 GB VPS runs about €5–8/month and will comfortably host both the WordPress site and the Django app with Postgres alongside. Total: under €10/month.
What you are also buying: nginx configuration, TLS certificate renewal, system updates, a backup strategy that you design and test yourself, uptime monitoring, log rotation, and the fact that you are the on-call engineer. Budget four to eight hours for the initial setup and an hour or two a month afterwards, more the first time something breaks.
This is the right answer if you enjoy that work or want to learn it. It is the wrong answer if the hours would otherwise go into the product, because at any plausible hourly rate the saved €20/month is the most expensive €20 you will ever save.
WordPress on shared hosting at $4/month or managed WordPress at $35, plus the application on a managed VPS from about $11. Total: $15–46/month depending on which end you pick.
This is the boring, correct answer for most side projects that have started to matter. Each workload sits on infrastructure designed for it, neither one can take the other down, and the operational burden is close to zero.
Push-to-deploy platforms will run the Django app with a managed Postgres for roughly $20–40/month at this size, and the WordPress site still needs somewhere else to live. Total is comparable to option C with less control and less setup.
The catch is the growth curve. PaaS pricing scales with usage in ways that are gentle at 8,000 visits and unpleasant at 800,000, and the platform-specific configuration is the part that makes leaving expensive.
Hosting comparisons almost always ignore the database, which is strange, because it is the component that actually loses data.
The honest test: if the database disappeared right now, how long would it take to rebuild, and from what? If the answer is "I could not", the database needs more protection than the application does.
The word does a great deal of work in hosting marketing, and it means different things:
⚠️ A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis, not a backup. Whatever tier you choose, restore one before you need to. It takes twenty minutes and it is the only way to find out that the dump has been silently empty for three months.
Most side projects never need to scale. The ones that do need to know the next step before they need it, because migrating under load is miserable.
⚠️ Steps 1 to 3 cover almost every project that is not a genuine success. Designing for step 4 on day one is the most common way to make a side project take twice as long and never ship.
The decision collapses fast once the four answers are written down:
Buy for the stage you are at, on the shortest term you can, and plan the migration you hope to need. Hosting is one of the few technical decisions that is cheap to change later and expensive to over-engineer now. A side project that outgrows its hosting has succeeded; one that was over-provisioned from day one has only spent money.