Roadmap › Networking & Hosting — How a Website Works, End to End › Module: Infrastructure Between the User and the App
Lessons in this course (12)
10. Hosting options — shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud PaaS, containers, serverless
Intermediate★ Must knowLesson 10 of 12
| Option | You manage | Good for | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared hosting | Only your files | Small sites, low budget | GoDaddy/Hostinger Windows plans with Plesk |
| VPS / virtual machine (IaaS) | OS, IIS/Nginx, patches, runtime, app | Full control, legacy apps | Azure VM, AWS EC2, DigitalOcean |
| Dedicated / on-premises server | Everything incl. hardware | Compliance, factories, intranets | Company data centre |
| PaaS (platform) | Only the app + config | Most web apps and APIs | Azure App Service, Elastic Beanstalk, Heroku |
| Static hosting + CDN | Just static files | SPAs, documentation, marketing sites | Azure Static Web Apps, Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Pages |
| Containers | Image + orchestration config | Microservices, portability | Azure Container Apps, AKS, ECS, Cloud Run |
| Serverless functions | Function code | Event-driven, spiky workloads | Azure Functions, AWS Lambda, Vercel Functions |
Trade-off: the less you manage, the less control you have — but also less patching, scaling and security work. A typical .NET stack today: React/Angular on Static Web Apps or a CDN, API on App Service/Container Apps, Azure SQL Database, Key Vault for secrets, Application Insights for monitoring.
Scaling: vertical (bigger machine) vs horizontal (more instances behind a load balancer — app must be stateless). High availability: multiple instances across availability zones, health checks, database replicas, backups and a tested restore.