Engineering Brief
Hosting for side projects — Cost per idle project is the number that decides this
Four of your five projects get no traffic this month and one might get all of it next month, which is a capacity problem dressed up as a billing problem.
The short answer
Put the whole run of experiments on one Turbo account at $4.66 a month: 25 websites, 20 GB of NVMe, 1 TB of bandwidth, 1 core and 2 GB of RAM, 50 MySQL databases. Marginal cost of the sixth idea is zero, which is the point.
The ceiling to watch is not disk, it is the shared 1 core / 2 GB allocation. Idle sites cost almost nothing against it; a single project doing sustained work — a scraper on cron, a queue worker, a build — costs the others. When one project starts earning that allocation, move that one out to a 1 Core VPS at $13.52 or up to Nitro at $7.08, and leave the rest exactly where they are.
Below: how to tell which project is eating the account, what the arithmetic looks like against per-project platform pricing, and how to move a single site without touching the other twenty-four.
By the HostingFast team · Reviewed 24 August 2026
Free
Migration per project
24/7
Support cover
Daily
Backup cadence
$0
Setup charge
The economics of side projects are unusual. Almost all of them are idle almost all of the time, so anything priced per project charges you for capacity you are not using. Anything priced per account charges you once and then gets out of the way.
That makes the interesting question a technical one: how much genuinely idle work can one shared allocation carry, and how do you spot the moment one project stops being idle? This page answers both with numbers rather than reassurance.
The arithmetic, done properly
Per-project platform pricing looks harmless at one project and absurd at six. Five small deployments at a typical per-project rate reach a monthly total that resembles a phone contract; five sites on Turbo cost $4.66 in total, and the sixth through the twenty-fifth cost nothing extra.
Do the sum over three years including domains and any add-on you would genuinely enable. That is the comparison, and it is the one nobody prints on a pricing page because it does not flatter the per-seat model.
The renewal figure matters more here than anywhere: with several projects on one account you are very unlikely to migrate on principle, so a host that resets the price in year two has effectively priced you by inertia. Turbo renews at $4.66.
Finding out which project is actually spending the account
The resource usage page in cPanel reports CPU, memory and entry processes against your allocation and shows when you hit the ceiling. That is the first place to look when everything feels slow at once — it is usually one site, not the plan.
From the shell, `ps -u $USER -o pid,pcpu,pmem,etime,cmd --sort=-pcpu | head` tells you what is running right now, and the per-site access logs tell you what has been hitting it. A prototype getting scraped by a bot can consume more of the allocation than a project with real users.
The two usual culprits are a cron interval set to every minute when every fifteen would do, and WordPress pseudo-cron firing on a site with just enough stray traffic to keep it busy. Both are configuration, not capacity.
Moving one project out without disturbing the rest
When a project deserves its own resources, the move is a single site rather than an account. Files come across with rsync or a cPanel backup of that one home directory, the database with mysqldump, and the DNS record for that one hostname changes while the other twenty-four keep resolving as they were.
The destination depends on why you are moving. Needs more shared headroom: Nitro at $7.08 gives you 2 cores, 4 GB, 200 GB of NVMe and backups every 6 hours. Needs root, a daemon, or a runtime that is not PHP: a 1 Core VPS at $13.52 or 2 Core at $20.28, KVM, full root, London or Dallas.
Because both live on the same platform, an upgrade inside the shared range is an account change with no migration at all. Only the step out to a VPS is a genuine move, and even that is one site rather than a whole estate.
Keeping twenty-five sites boring
Boring is the goal. Free SSL reissues itself on every domain, a daily backup runs on the account with self-service restores from the panel, and Softaculous stands up WordPress or any of 240+ applications in one click when a new idea arrives at eleven at night.
PHP version is set per site, so the 2019 experiment can stay where it is while the new one runs on a current branch. Staging copies exist for the projects that reach the point of having users worth not annoying.
If you want to test the platform before committing the estate to it, migrate one live project in for free and give it a fortnight. Shared plans carry a 30-day money-back window, and HostingFast is a trading name of Vitalcare at Home Ltd, company number 15098204 — a check that takes about a minute.
Our position on this page, stated
We sell hosting and we are recommending our own plan. Saying so up front is cheaper than pretending to be a review site, and it lets the rest of the page spend its words on capacity numbers instead of superlatives.
Everything above is checkable: the specs are on the plan page, the diagnostic commands run on any account, and the resource meter lives in cPanel where you can watch it yourself.
- Cost per additional project: nothing, up to 25
- The allocation published, not implied
- Diagnostics you can run before you buy
- Move one site out without touching the others
Why HostingFast
Standard on every plan
Twenty-five sites, one invoice
Turbo carries 25 websites on 20 GB of NVMe for $4.66 a month, so the marginal experiment is free to start.
A visible resource ceiling
cPanel reports CPU, memory and entry process usage against your allocation, so 'is it the plan or is it my code' has an answer.
Per-site PHP
An old prototype on an old branch and a new build on a current one, side by side, switched from the panel.
One-click stand-up
Softaculous installs WordPress and 240+ other applications, which is how an idea at 11pm becomes a URL by 11:10.
An exit for the winner
Nitro at $7.08 or a VPS from $13.52 takes the breakout project without disturbing the other twenty-four.
Renewal at the order rate
$4.66 now and $4.66 next year, which matters most on the account you are least likely to move.
Prices Side by Side
Our numbers next to the big names
Typical intro and renewal pricing across the market, lined up against ours — including the renewal figure most comparison charts skip.
| Feature | HostingFastMost popular | Typical household-name host | Typical bargain host | Typical loss-leader deal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price / mo* | $2.42/mo | $4–$6 | $2–$4 | $1–$3 |
| Renewal price / mo | $2.42/mo | $10–$15 | $8–$12 | $4–$6 |
| Cheapest plan renews at its sign-up price | ||||
| SSL as standard | ||||
| Migration done for you | ||||
| NVMe drives on the cheapest tier | ||||
| Daily backups from the first tier | ||||
| Real humans on support, 24/7 |
*Our number is the lowest-priced plan we sell on an annual term, pulled live from the same catalogue that powers our pricing page — it physically cannot fall out of date. The other three columns show the ranges shared hosts in each bracket typically advertise: introductory offers that mostly demand a one-to-four-year commitment, then jump once it expires. We no longer name rivals or print their prices, because a figure we cannot verify on the day you read it has no business on this page. Line us up against whichever host you are really weighing — and give the renewal row the hardest look.
Quick Start
From order to online
- 1
Count the idle ones honestly
Projects with no traffic still need a URL, a certificate and a backup. Price the whole set, not the one you are excited about.
- 2
Watch the allocation for a week
The cPanel resource meter plus `ps -u $USER -o pcpu,pmem,cmd --sort=-pcpu` will name your expensive project inside seven days.
- 3
Fix the schedule before you buy capacity
A cron running every minute and WordPress pseudo-cron are the two commonest reasons a small account feels full.
- 4
Promote one project, not the estate
Move the winner to Nitro or a VPS. Leave the experiments where they are, cheap and quiet.
Built In
Loaded onto every plan
- 25 websites on one Turbo account, each with its own domain
- NVMe on every tier, Sprint upwards, not just the top of the range
- Full SSH with Git and Composer for deployment and diagnostics
- Softaculous: WordPress plus 240+ applications in one click
- Staging copies for the projects that acquire real users
- Daily backups with restores you run yourself from the panel
- Mailboxes on your own domain, with IMAP, POP and SMTP
- Every mailbox screened for spam and viruses before delivery
- In-place upgrades between shared tiers, with no migration
- A 99.9% uptime target, backed by a pro-rated credit if a month falls short
Frequently Asked
What people ask us most often
How many small sites will one Turbo allocation genuinely carry?
Twenty-five is the licensed limit, and idle sites are close to free against 1 core and 2 GB. The binding constraint is concurrent PHP work, not site count: one project running a scraper every minute will crowd the account harder than twenty static prototypes ever will. Watch the entry-process figure in cPanel, not the site count.
What is the earliest sign a project needs its own server?
Sustained pressure rather than spikes — the resource meter sitting near the ceiling during ordinary hours, TTFB drifting upward on the other sites, or a background job that no longer finishes inside its window. At that point move that one project to Nitro at $7.08 or a VPS from $13.52 and the rest go back to normal.
Can I point a different domain at each project?
Yes. Each of the 25 sites takes its own domain with its own free SSL certificate and its own mailboxes, all inside the one account. Subdomains work too if a project does not deserve a registration yet.
Do the quiet projects still get backed up?
Every site on the account gets the daily backup, active or not, and any of them restores from the panel in minutes. The project you forgot about is exactly the one you will want a restore for.
Keep reading
Joomla Hosting Plans
What Joomla asks of PHP, MySQL and memory, and which tier stops it feeling sluggish in the admin.
VPS Hosting for Developers
Where the shared allocation stops being enough: root, KVM, and what the smallest usable box actually costs.
How to Test Your Website Speed
How to produce a TTFB and LCP figure per project so you can rank them by who is spending the account.
Web Hosting
The shared range in full: Sprint, Turbo and Nitro, with the cores, memory and storage printed for each.
VPS Hosting
KVM virtual servers with full root from $13.52 a month, London or Dallas, DDoS filtering in front.
Changing hosts? Run through our checklist first.
A straightforward sequence for a switch your visitors never feel: which files move first, how to shift email across without losing a single message, the right moment to repoint DNS, and the two mistakes behind almost all the downtime we get asked to rescue.
One account. Every idea you have had this year.
Turbo at $4.66 a month: 25 sites, 20 GB NVMe, SSH with Git, and an upgrade path for whichever one takes off.
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