Short answer: for a company website or a WooCommerce shop serving European customers, a LiteSpeed-based shared or cloud plan from a serious European host is all you need. You do not need a dedicated server, a Kubernetes cluster or a managed WordPress brand at ten times the price unless you are running something with real infrastructure demands. What you do need is the right handful of features, and most cheap hosting is missing at least two of them.
We have run client sites on a lot of hosting over the years, including our own reseller plans. This is the checklist we use before we recommend a host, and the one we recommend at the end.
What actually matters
The web server. LiteSpeed or a properly tuned Nginx. LiteSpeed matters for WordPress because its cache plugin talks directly to the server: full-page cache, object cache, HTTP/3 and image optimisation are handled in one place, and a well-built site on LiteSpeed will pass Core Web Vitals without a separate caching plugin. Apache with mod_php is what you get on the cheapest plans, and it is why those plans feel slow.
Location. The server should sit in the same region as your customers. A shop selling in Germany hosted in the United States adds a hundred milliseconds to every request before WordPress has done anything. For European customers, a European data centre; for a global audience, a CDN in front.
Current PHP and a real database. PHP 8.2 or newer, MariaDB or MySQL 8, and the ability to raise memory limits and execution time without opening a ticket. A host that still defaults to PHP 7 is telling you how it maintains everything else.
Object cache. Redis or Memcached available on the plan. WooCommerce with a few thousand products, or any site with logged-in users, gets a large part of its speed from object caching, and it is the first thing missing on budget plans.
Security at the server, not only in a plugin. A web application firewall such as Imunify360 or an equivalent, malware scanning, and DDoS protection in the network. A security plugin inside WordPress is the last line, not the first.
Backups you can restore yourself. Daily, kept for at least two weeks, with a one-click restore in the control panel. Test it once. A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a backup.
Email that is not your web server. Transactional email from WordPress should go through an SMTP service or the host’s mail platform with SPF, DKIM and DMARC set. Order confirmations landing in spam cost more than the hosting.
Support that answers in your working hours. Measured in minutes on a ticket, not in a marketing page. Ask a pre-sales question and time the reply.
What you can ignore
- “Unlimited” anything. It means “until we notice”.
- Free domain for the first year. It is the price of the second year that matters.
- Site builders bundled with the plan. You will use WordPress.
- Uptime percentages with more nines than the support desk has staff.
The checklist
| Requirement | Company website | WooCommerce shop |
|---|---|---|
| LiteSpeed with HTTP/3 | Recommended | Required |
| Data centre in your customers’ region | Required | Required |
| PHP 8.2+, MariaDB or MySQL 8 | Required | Required |
| Redis or Memcached | Nice to have | Required |
| Server-level firewall and malware scanning | Required | Required |
| Daily backups, self-service restore | Required | Required, with database point-in-time if possible |
| SMTP or authenticated mail with SPF, DKIM, DMARC | Recommended | Required |
| Staging environment | Nice to have | Recommended |
| Dedicated resources (VPS or cloud) | Not needed | From a few thousand orders a month |
When you actually need more
Shared or cloud hosting stops being enough when the site itself is the infrastructure: a marketplace with thousands of concurrent sessions, an application with heavy background processing, a shop doing tens of thousands of orders a month, or anything with regulatory requirements on where and how data is stored. At that point you are buying dedicated servers or cloud infrastructure and someone to run it, and the hosting bill becomes a line in an engineering budget rather than a subscription. Most businesses reading this are not there, and paying for it early buys nothing.
Headless builds are a separate case. The WordPress side still lives on ordinary hosting like the above; the Next.js front end runs where Node applications run, and we advise on that per project.
What we recommend
For clients in Europe we recommend SiteBunker. It ticks every line in the table: LiteSpeed with HTTP/3, European data centres, Imunify360 at the server, network-level DDoS protection, Redis on the plans that need it, daily backups with self-service restore, and support that answers quickly in working hours. We have hosted our own and our clients’ WordPress sites there for years, which is why we are comfortable putting the name here.
Hosting advice is included in every shop and website we build: we tell you which plan, we set it up, and we do not sell you more server than the site needs.
Frequently asked questions
Is managed WordPress hosting worth it?
Sometimes, for teams with no technical contact at all. If you have a developer or an agency, a LiteSpeed plan with the features above gives the same result at a fraction of the price.
Do I need a CDN?
For customers in one region and a server in that region, not necessarily. For a global audience or a media-heavy site, yes; a CDN in front of LiteSpeed is a good combination.
Can I move hosts later?
Yes. A WordPress site is files plus a database, and a competent host or agency migrates it in a few hours with no downtime. Keep the domain in your own name and moving is always possible.
