Start from traffic, not ambition
A brochure site serving a few thousand visitors a month is comfortable on shared hosting. The mistake is buying for the traffic you hope to have rather than the traffic you can measure, then paying for idle capacity for a year.
What actually forces an upgrade
Rarely bandwidth. Usually one of these:
- CPU time from an unoptimised plugin or query
- Memory limits during checkout or import
- Concurrent PHP workers during a campaign
- Disk filled by uncompressed images and old backups
Upgrade paths that do not hurt
Choose a host where the next tier is a plan change rather than a migration. Moving between plans on the same server means a few seconds of reconfiguration; moving between providers means DNS propagation, mail interruption and a weekend.
