Q&A › Hosting
What you are renting when you pay for hosting, what the words mean, and when you do not need to pay for it at all.
Hosting is the least understood line on most invoices. It is also one of the easiest places to be overcharged, so it is worth ten minutes of your time.
Space on a computer that stays switched on and connected, so your files are there when somebody asks for them. That is the whole product. The differences between hosting plans come down to how much of that computer you get and who fixes it when it breaks.
Shared means many sites on one machine, splitting the cost and the resources — fine for most small business sites. VPS gives you a guaranteed slice. Dedicated is the whole machine. The step up is worth paying for when traffic or a heavy application justifies it, and not before.
No. Their monthly fee includes it. That is part of what makes those platforms simple, and also part of what makes them hard to leave: the hosting, the software and the files are one bundle rather than three things you own separately.
A network that keeps copies of your images in several places so they load from somewhere near the visitor. It helps noticeably if your audience is spread across the country and barely at all if your customers are all within twenty miles. Most local businesses do not need to pay for one.
It scrambles the traffic between the visitor and the site so it cannot be read in transit, and it is why browsers show a padlock instead of "Not secure". Every site needs it now, including ones that take no payments — browsers warn visitors away from sites without it.
Far less than hosts imply. A typical small business site is a few hundred megabytes and serves a few gigabytes a month. If a plan is upselling you on storage, it is selling you something you are unlikely to use.
Your site is unreachable until it comes back, and email at your domain may stop too if it runs on the same provider. This is the argument for keeping email separate from hosting: two outages that cannot happen at once are better than one that takes out both.
Technically yes, practically no. Home connections have changing addresses, slow upload speeds, no protection against attacks, and they go down whenever your power does. The cost of real hosting is lower than the cost of one bad weekend.
For a hobby project or something you are testing, yes. For a business, the usual catches are adverts on your pages, no custom domain, and no path to move the site when you outgrow it. Read what happens to your files if you stop using it before you start.
You, ideally, with whoever maintains the site added as a user. If the account is in your developer's name you cannot move, cannot grant access to anyone else, and cannot recover anything if they become unreachable. This is the single most common way small businesses lose a website.
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