Legacy, Premium or Cloud: which hosting plan fits your site?
Choose Legacy for a site that needs disk space, email and reliability, such as a brochure site, a static site or a low-traffic WordPress site. Choose Premium for a site that does real work on every visit, such as a shop or a booking site, or when you or your developer need SSH. Choose a Cloud server when you need a Linux server of your own, with root, and are ready to run the operating system yourself. The deciding questions are what your site does, and who you want looking after the server.
The three at a glance
| Legacy (sLegacy) | Premium (sPremium) | Cloud | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Shared hosting | Shared hosting with dedicated compute | A self-managed Linux server |
| Who runs the server | Noiz | Noiz | You run the operating system; Noiz keeps the platform and network healthy |
| Control panel | Plesk | Plesk | None; full root over SSH |
| PHP | Shared PHP pool | A dedicated PHP-FPM pool, your choice of PHP version | Whatever you install |
| Developer tools | Not included | SSH access to your own account, WP Toolkit | Anything you install |
| Included, with webmail and filtering | Included, with webmail and filtering | Not part of the server | |
| Backups | Weekly, kept off site | Weekly, kept off site | Backups are yours to run |
| Best for | Brochure, static and low-traffic WordPress sites, with business mail | Shops, booking and membership sites, busy WordPress sites | Custom stacks and self-hosted applications |
Legacy: space, mail and reliability
Legacy is our entry-level hosting for sites that need room and email more than processing power. It gives you bundled mailboxes, free certificates, a weekly backup and the Plesk control panel with one-click installers.
Legacy runs PHP on a shared pool and leaves out the developer toolset: there is no SSH, Git or Node.js, and no choice of PHP version. For a site that mostly serves pages and handles email, you do not need them. A static site built by hand, by a site generator or with an AI assistant, uploaded over FTPS, runs very well on Legacy.
Each Legacy tier prints how many sites, mailboxes and databases it holds.
Premium: compute and SSH access
Premium is the hosting we recommend when a site does real work. A shop, a membership site or a booking system builds pages for each visitor, talks to its database and runs scheduled jobs. That needs processing power you can count on.
Every Premium tier has its own dedicated PHP-FPM pool, so another customer's traffic spike cannot take your site's PHP workers. Each tier steps up the cores, memory and disk of the one below it.
Premium also adds:
- SSH access to your own hosting account
- your choice of PHP version for each site
- WP Toolkit, for staging, cloning, updates and hardening of WordPress sites
There is no count on domains, mailboxes or databases: the plan's published caps are the limit. Noiz still runs, patches and watches the server, the panel and the mail.
Cloud: a server of your own
A Noiz Cloud server is a Linux server that belongs to you. Each size states its cores, memory, SSD disk and monthly transfer, with one dedicated IPv4 address and full root over SSH. You choose Ubuntu or Debian.
Root means you can install any runtime, web server, database or tool you want, and run software that a control panel cannot host, such as your own background services or containers. It also means the operating system is yours to look after: its updates, its firewall, its users, and the backups of what runs on it. Noiz keeps the platform and the network healthy underneath. Our help centre's initial server setup with Ubuntu shows the first jobs on a new server.
Cloud suits developers who want a custom stack, and businesses running self-hosted open-source applications. If you would like help with a server, ask in a ticket.
Who runs what
The biggest difference between the three is not size. It is who does the system administration.
- On Legacy and Premium, Noiz runs the server: the operating system, nginx and Apache, PHP-FPM, MariaDB, mail, certificates and backups. You run your sites and their code.
- On Cloud, you run everything from the operating system up.
Many sites that outgrow Legacy are better served by Premium than by a server of their own. Premium gives a busy site dedicated compute and SSH access, while Noiz keeps patching the server underneath. Choose Cloud when you need root, not just more power.
Questions that decide it
- Does the site run code on every visit? If it mostly serves pages and mail, choose Legacy. If it is a shop, a booking system or an application, choose Premium.
- Do you or your developer need SSH access, or to run your own runtimes such as Node.js? Choose Premium for SSH access to your own account, or Cloud for a server you control fully.
- Do you need software that a control panel cannot run, or root access? Then choose Cloud.
- Are you ready to patch, secure and back up a server yourself? If not, stay with Premium.
- Do you want email on the same plan as the website? Legacy and Premium include it.
Moving between plans
Moving between Legacy and Premium is a plan change on the same control panel, not a migration, so you can start on Legacy and move up when the site needs it. Moving to a Cloud server means moving to a new server. Tell us what you run and we will explain what the move involves.
Ask which plan fits
Every Legacy and Premium tier, with its caps, is on the shared hosting page, and every Cloud size is on the Cloud page. If you are not sure, open a ticket and tell us what you host and how busy it gets; we will say which fits, and we will say so if none does.
Sources
Checked 19 October 2026.
Noiz
- Shared hosting: Legacy, Premium and Reseller
- Cloud servers
- PHP Handlers on Noiz Hosting, and Which to Choose (Noiz help centre)
- Initial Server Setup with Ubuntu on a Noiz VPS (Noiz help centre)
Note: while some of this content was produced with the help of AI, the final editing has been done by a real human being.
