Hosting Requirements Calculator
Work out what kind of hosting your site really needs. Six questions on traffic, stack and requirements, and an honest answer on whether free hosting is enough.
What this is actually calculating
The number that decides whether a hosting plan works is not disk space. It’s concurrent PHP processes — how many pages your site can build at the same time.
The arithmetic:
requests per second = process slots ÷ seconds per page
Ten slots and a two-second page gives you five requests per second. The eleventh simultaneous visitor gets a 508 error, no matter how much disk you bought.
That’s why the calculator asks about caching before it asks about traffic. Caching serves a saved copy without running PHP, so cached requests don’t consume a slot at all. Turning it on routinely moves the ceiling by 10× or more — further than any upgrade, and free.
Why a VPS usually isn’t the answer
A VPS is not better hosting. It’s less hosting — an empty Linux box where security patches, web server config, PHP, MySQL, TLS certificates and backups all become your job.
That’s a fine trade if you want the control or need a runtime shared hosting won’t run. It’s a bad trade if you want a website. The calculator only recommends one when your answers genuinely require it.
The things that rule free hosting out
Regardless of traffic, free hosting is wrong if any of these apply:
- Outbound email has to work. Free hosts block SMTP as an anti-spam measure. An HTTP email API works around it; nothing else does.
- You need real cron, SSH, or a language other than PHP.
- Downtime costs money. There’s no SLA on something you didn’t pay for.
- You can’t take your own backups. Free plans don’t back up your data.
If none of those apply, free hosting is genuinely the right tool and paying would be a waste. The full breakdown is here, and if you’re still working out what any of this means, start with what is web hosting.