What hosting is, in one paragraph
Your website is a set of files and a database. Hosting is the computer they live on, connected to the internet, switched on all the time. When someone types your address, that computer sends them your pages. Everything about how fast, how reliably and how safely that happens is decided by which computer you rent and who runs it.
The price bands
Under $5 a month: shared hosting. Your site shares a server with hundreds of others. When any of them gets busy, yours slows down. Support is a ticket queue. Backups are often extra or absent. The price is real and so are the trade-offs; the site typically takes a second or more just to start responding. Acceptable for a hobby site. A false economy for a business whose enquiries depend on the site loading.
$20 to $50 a month: managed hosting. For WordPress sites, this is the sensible band. Providers such as Kinsta, WP Engine, Flywheel, SiteGround's upper tiers, Cloudways and similar. You get a server tuned for the platform, daily backups you can restore yourself, a staging copy, security scanning, a caching layer that makes the site fast, and a human who answers within minutes. This is what most business sites should be on.
$0 to $20 a month: modern static and framework hosting. Sites built on Next.js or similar frameworks host on platforms such as Vercel, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages. The free tiers genuinely cover many small business sites; the paid tiers add team features and higher limits. The site is served from locations around the world and there is no server to maintain. Fast by default.
$100 and up: you probably do not need this. Dedicated servers, high-traffic plans, enterprise support. A ten-page business site does not.
What the money buys
The difference between the bands is not the number of visitors you can have. A ten-page site with a few thousand visits a month barely registers on any of them. The differences are:
- Speed. Response time, caching, and whether the server is shared with noisy neighbours.
- Backups. Whether they happen, how often, how long they are kept, and whether you can restore without a support ticket.
- Staging. A copy of the site to test changes on before they go live.
- Security. Firewall, malware scanning, automatic patching of the server.
- Support. Chat in minutes versus a ticket in days.
- Uptime. Whether the host notices and fixes outages before you do.
The cheap band lacks most of these. The managed band includes them. That is where the money goes, and it is why the extra $25 a month is worth it for a site that brings in business.
Whose name it should be in
Yours. Your account, your card, your login. Your developer or agency gets added as a user.
Agencies often bundle hosting into a monthly fee and keep the account in their name. It is convenient and it is a lock-in. If you part ways, your site is on their account, and moving it depends on their goodwill and speed. If they go out of business, your site may go with them.
Paying for your own hosting costs the same or less, gives you a direct line to the host's support, and means you can change developer without changing anything else. It is one of the two accounts, along with your domain, that a business should never let anyone else hold.
Signs you are overpaying
- A bundled "hosting and maintenance" fee with no itemisation, where the hosting component would cost a third as much bought directly.
- A plan sized for traffic you do not have.
- Paying for features, such as multiple sites or developer tools, that only the agency uses.
Ask for the itemised cost of the hosting and compare it to the provider's public price.
Signs you are underpaying
- Your site takes more than a second to start loading, before any images.
- There is no staging copy and updates are done live.
- You do not know when the last backup was or how to restore it.
- Support means a ticket and a wait.
- The host's name is one you have never heard of and the plan costs less than a coffee.
Any two of these on a site that produces enquiries, and the saving is costing you more than it saves.
What we recommend
For WordPress: managed hosting in the $25 to $40 band, in your name. For framework-built sites: Vercel or equivalent, often free, in your name. In both cases, the hosting is set up as part of the website project, the account is yours from day one, and the monthly cost is on the proposal as a line you pay directly, so there is never a question about what it costs or who owns it.