Step 1 of 10

Can your shared hosting run Laravel?

Yes, most cPanel hosting can run Laravel well. Spend ten minutes on these checks first, and you will avoid the errors that stop most first deployments.

What Laravel needs

PHP 8.2 or newer for Laravel 11 and 12. Change it in cPanel → MultiPHP Manager (or Select PHP Version).
PHP extensions: Ctype, cURL, DOM, Fileinfo, Filter, Hash, Mbstring, OpenSSL, PCRE, PDO, Session, Tokenizer and XML. Most hosts have these on.
A MySQL or MariaDB database, which every cPanel plan includes.
About 300 MB of disk space, because vendor/ alone is large.

What to ask your host

Three limits shape how you deploy, so find them out now:

Is there SSH or a Terminal? Look for Terminal in cPanel. Without it you can still deploy; this guide shows how.
How often can cron run? Some hosts allow every minute, others only every 5 or 15 minutes. It decides how quickly queued jobs and scheduled tasks run.
How many emails per hour? Many plans cap this at 100 or fewer, which matters if you send newsletters.

See what PHP really has

Create a file with this line in public_html, open it in your browser, then delete it, because it shows details about your server.

<?php phpinfo();

The Terminal and cron can use a different PHP version from your website. Chapter 6 shows how to call the right one.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a VPS for Laravel?

Not for most blogs, business sites and small apps. Choose a VPS when you need long-running queue workers, WebSockets, or more traffic than your plan allows.

Can I run Laravel without SSH?

Yes. You upload the files as a zip, import the database in phpMyAdmin and use cron for artisan commands. Each chapter covers the no-SSH route.