What does a shared plan actually limit?
Four things, whether or not the plan page says so: processor time, memory, the number of files, and sometimes a count of simultaneous processes or database connections. The host enforces them per account so one customer cannot consume the server. The plan page tells you which of these the host is willing to put a number on, and that willingness is itself information.
From the plan pages we read on 13 October 2026: Flashcloud and Hosting.com state cores and RAM per plan (2 cores and 2 GB at the entry level); SiteGround states CPU seconds per hour, inodes, RAM per process and a database cap; FastComet publishes a resource policy with a sustained-use rule; HostPapa and FastComet use relative tiers (1x to 8x, base to 3x); Bluehost and Hostinger publish visit guidance or fair-use lists rather than cores and RAM.
What is an inode?
A file or a directory. Every image, every plugin file, every cached page, every email in a mailbox is one inode. A fresh WordPress install with a handful of plugins uses roughly 10,000 to 30,000; a site with a big media library, a caching plugin writing page files and a few years of email can pass 200,000 without anyone noticing. Limits on the hosts that publish them start around 200,000 (SiteGround StartUp, AccuWeb Bootstrap++) and rise with the plan.
When you hit the limit, uploads fail and email bounces. The usual culprits are mail folders and cache directories, and the fix is deleting, not upgrading.
What are CPU seconds?
A budget of processor time per hour. SiteGround’s plans allow 1,000, 2,000 and 4,000 CPU seconds an hour; a request that runs PHP and the database for a quarter of a second spends a quarter of a second of it. A site served from cache spends almost nothing, because cached pages do not run PHP. A store, a forum or a site with a plugin that rebuilds menus on every request can spend the whole budget at lunchtime and serve errors until the hour turns.
Hosts that do not publish CPU seconds still enforce something similar, usually as a CPU percentage or a sustained-use rule (FastComet disallows constant use of 80 percent of plan resources for an hour).
What does RAM limit?
How much a single page build can hold and how many can run at once. SiteGround’s 768 MB per process is a per-request ceiling; Flashcloud’s 2 GB on Start and Hosting.com’s 2 GB on Starter are per-account allocations that all running processes share. For a cached brochure site either is plenty. For WooCommerce, where cart and checkout pages are built fresh and image imports run in the background, the per-account figure is the one that decides how many shoppers can act at once; our WooCommerce list ranks the hosts on it.
What does “good for 25,000 visits” mean?
A guess by the host about an average site. Visit guidance (Bluehost) is honest about intent and useless for comparison, because 25,000 visits to cached pages and 25,000 visits to a search-heavy catalogue are different loads by a factor of fifty. Treat it as a hint about which tier the host expects you to buy, not as a capacity.
How do you read a relative tier?
As a ratio with no base. “2x resources” on FastComet’s Plus and HostPapa’s Growth means twice the entry plan, and the entry plan’s allocation is not printed. The tiers tell you the host’s plans are proportional to each other and nothing about whether the base is 1 GB or 4. When two hosts both state cores and RAM you can compare them; when one states a tier, you cannot, and our rankings say so where it matters.