Cloud
The underlying servers WordPress sites run on. General-purpose clouds (Hetzner, Vultr, AWS…) appear here as infrastructure; providers that also operate WordPress hosting — like DigitalOcean via Cloudways — additionally have a host profile.
Products in this layer
Market Share →
Switching cost. Infrastructure is the deepest layer and the hardest to move; everything above sits on it.
What this layer really decides
The cloud layer is the box your customers’ sites actually run on. Everything above it — panels, billing, security, maintenance — assumes this layer exists and rarely touches it again. That is exactly why it is the hardest layer to change later, and the most consequential to get right at the start.
The practical split today is between general-purpose infrastructure (a VPS, bare metal, or a broad cloud you configure yourself) and a WordPress-specific platform like WP Cloud, which is built and tuned for one workload rather than many.
Single-workload vs everything-capable
A general-purpose stack is designed to run almost anything — WordPress, Drupal, a Node app, a mail server. That flexibility carries weight: more moving parts to patch, tune, and support, much of which a host running only WordPress never needs. A single-workload platform trades that breadth for depth — caching, PHP, and database behavior tuned for WordPress out of the box.
For a smaller host or an agency moving into hosting, that trade usually favors the focused platform: less to operate, fewer ways to get the configuration wrong, and a shorter path from “customer signs up” to “site is live.”
The on-ramp matters
A registrar or agency is often the first point of contact for a new website. If hosting isn’t offered at that moment, the customer leaves to find it elsewhere. Closing the gap between a domain purchase and a launched WordPress site keeps that site on the open web — and keeps the revenue with the operator who started the relationship.