Developer Buying Guide
Laravel hosting plans — Sizing Laravel hosting from the profile, not the brochure
Most Laravel plans are bought on adjectives. Yours should be bought on a request profile you took yourself.
The short answer
Profile the application first, then buy to the profile. Business hosting with SSH, Composer and per-site PHP handles a conventional application, and a VPS takes over once queue workers and long-running daemons enter the picture — both routes are available here, and the profile tells you which line you are on.
The rest of this page is the measurement: what to record before you shop, which platform capabilities those figures imply, the caching trick that improves a benchmark without improving a request, and how to confirm the move helped.
By the HostingFast team · Reviewed 24 August 2026
99.9%
Uptime target, monitored
24/7
Engineers on duty
Free
SSL on every plan
NVMe
Drives, every tier
Written for developers who would rather read a timeline than a feature grid. If you can say how many queries a typical request makes and how long the slowest one takes, this decision resolves itself in about ten minutes.
One cron entry calling schedule:run drives every timed task in a Laravel application. That single design decision makes real cron plus shell access the difference between a framework behaving as documented and one you spend your evenings working around.
Profile the application before you price anything
Install Telescope or Clockwork on a staging copy and drive the three routes that carry most of your traffic. Write down four figures for each: queries per request, the slowest single query, total response time, and peak memory.
Two of those numbers do the deciding. A request making forty queries has an eager-loading problem, not a hosting problem, and moving it to a bigger machine buys you a smaller version of the same delay. A request making six queries and still taking 800 milliseconds is a platform problem, and that is what you are shopping for.
Then count the background work: scheduled commands, queued jobs per hour, and anything that has to stay resident. That count is the line between a managed account and a server of your own.
What those figures demand from a platform
A current PHP 8 release with OPcache enabled, because config, route and view caches all assume compiled opcode is being reused rather than rebuilt per request.
SSH with Composer and Git, since a single deploy touches all three and a control-panel file manager touches none of them.
System cron that fires on the minute, plus somewhere for queue:work to live. Database or Redis drivers invoked from cron cover modest throughput; sustained volume wants supervised workers.
Database headroom, because Eloquent makes it effortless to generate far more queries than you intended and the bill arrives as latency.
The cache that improves your benchmark and not your request
Running config:cache and route:cache on a deploy is worth doing, and it is also the point where a lot of teams stop looking. Those caches shave milliseconds off bootstrap. They do nothing at all for the 300-millisecond query sitting in the middle of your slowest endpoint.
The same trap applies to a plan chosen on FTP-era hosting, where Composer times out and artisan has no shell to run in. The application will appear to install and then quietly misbehave for months.
Fix the profile first. Add an index, eager-load the relation, cache the expensive aggregate. Then buy the platform that lets the improved profile actually reach the browser.
Our pick, and the proof it moved
Overdrive is the plan this page resolves to: SSH from signup, Composer and Git on the path, PostgreSQL and MySQL both available, 3.5 cores and 2.5 GB of RAM, and native support for Node, Python and Ruby alongside PHP if the stack ever widens.
Confirm it with the same instrumentation you used to profile: run the identical routes on the new account, compare response time and query time side by side, and check that scheduled commands fired on the minute rather than four minutes late.
Then put us through the commercial checks too — renewal rate against order rate, a hard support question at an inconvenient hour, the refund terms read in full, and the company registration looked up.
Our commercial interest, stated in the body copy
We are a host writing about hosting and we would rather say it here than bury it. No manufactured neutrality, no leaderboard funded by referral cheques — which is what frees this page to be about mechanisms and numbers instead of star ratings.
NVMe storage and LiteSpeed caching sit under every tier from the entry plan upward, so the fast components are the baseline rather than an upsell.
- Checks written so you can run them yourself
- Renewal rate printed, not footnoted
- SSH, Composer and Git from the first login
- Refund terms with the carve-outs named
Why HostingFast
Standard on every plan
A real toolchain, not a file manager
SSH, Git and Composer are enabled at signup on the developer tiers, which is the whole prerequisite for a Laravel deploy.
Both database engines available
PostgreSQL and MySQL sit side by side on Business hosting, so the schema decision stays yours rather than the host's.
Cron that fires on the minute
System cron drives schedule:run properly, which is the difference between a scheduler and a suggestion.
Overdrive, in numbers
500 GB of disk, 3.5 cores, 2.5 GB of RAM and the full developer toolbelt at one published monthly rate.
An upgrade that is not a migration
Shared, VPS and dedicated run on one platform, so growing out of a tier is an account change rather than a weekend.
Paperwork you can look up
The trading name belongs to Vitalcare at Home Ltd, registered in England and Wales and on the public register.
Quick Start
From order to online
- 1
Take the request profile
Queries per request, slowest query, response time and peak memory on your three busiest routes. Ten minutes with Telescope beats an afternoon in feature grids.
- 2
Count the background work
Scheduled commands, queued jobs per hour and anything resident. That number, not your traffic figure, decides shared-tier versus VPS.
- 3
Cost it out over two years
Renewal rate times the term, plus every extra you would genuinely enable. The lowest headline figure rarely survives the multiplication.
- 4
Re-run the profile after the move
Identical routes, identical dataset, same time of day. If response time fell but query time did not, the platform helped and your code still needs work.
Built In
Loaded onto every plan
- SSH enabled from signup, with Git and Composer already on the path
- PHP 8.x selectable per site, with OPcache switched on
- System cron with minute granularity for schedule:run
- PostgreSQL and MySQL both available on the Business tier
- NVMe SSD under the database, not spinning disk
- Staging copies so a migration is tested before it is trusted
- Free SSL that renews itself well ahead of expiry
- Renewal charged at the rate you ordered at
- Free migration of an existing application by our engineers
- 99.9% uptime as the target, monitored around the clock
Frequently Asked
What people ask us most often
How do I tell whether my slowness is code or hosting?
Compare total response time against the sum of your query times. If queries account for most of it, no hosting plan fixes that — index the columns and eager-load the relations. If queries are a small fraction and the request is still slow, you are looking at PHP execution, disk latency or a saturated machine, and that is a platform decision.
What throughput can cron-driven queue workers actually handle?
Invoking queue:work in short batches from cron copes comfortably with the order of a few hundred jobs an hour — emails, notifications, thumbnails. Once jobs arrive faster than a batch clears, the backlog grows monotonically and you need supervised resident workers, which means a VPS with root.
Does OPcache need tuning or is the default fine?
The default is fine for a single application. Once several Laravel projects share one account, check opcache_get_status for cache-full events and restarts — a full opcode cache silently reverts you to compiling on every request, which is the single most expensive regression available on a PHP host.
Can I move an existing Laravel application across without downtime?
Yes. We copy files, database and configuration free of charge, you point a temporary hostname at the copy and run your test suite and your profiler against it, and DNS changes only when you are satisfied. The old environment carries live traffic throughout, so there is no gap and no rollback drama.
Keep reading
Dedicated Server Value
Bare metal costed per core and per gigabyte, for workloads that have outgrown a tier.
Joomla vs WordPress
Two content platforms compared on what each does to a request, not on feature count.
How to Test Your Website Speed
How to take a speed measurement that means something, and what to do with the result.
Laravel Hosting
Laravel-ready hosting with Composer, SSH and Git-driven deploys.
Web Hosting
cPanel hosting on NVMe with SSL, migration and a year-one domain in the price.
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.
Deploy it with a real toolchain.
SSH, Composer, Git and cron from the first login, on NVMe behind LiteSpeed, at a rate that does not move at renewal.
View Laravel Hosting plans