What hosting actually does

What you are actually buying

A machine that is switched on, connected, and configured to answer for your address. That sounds simple and the value is in it never stopping, which is harder than it sounds.

You are also buying maintenance. Security patches, software updates and capacity management all happen on that machine, and on managed hosting somebody else does them.

And you are buying somebody to call. When a site is down at eight in the morning, the difference between hosts is almost entirely about who answers and how quickly.

You are also buying somewhere for email to be handled, or not. Hosting and business email are separate services more often than people expect, and assuming they come together is a common surprise.

Shared, managed and dedicated

Shared hosting puts many sites on one machine. It is inexpensive and a busy neighbor can slow you down, which is the trade and it is usually acceptable for a small site.

Managed hosting handles the software as well as the machine, including updates and backups. It costs more and it removes work that in most small businesses nobody was doing.

Dedicated and cloud arrangements give you the whole machine or a scalable slice. Neither is necessary for a brochure site and both are sold to businesses that do not need them.

What decides real-world speed

Not usually the host. Oversized images, third-party scripts and heavy pages account for most slow small business sites, and the fastest hosting will not rescue any of them.

Our page on page speed covers the order to work in. Fix your own pages first, then look at the host, which is the opposite of how it is usually approached.

Where hosting does matter is distance and consistency. A server far from your customers adds delay on every request, and a cheap overloaded one is unpredictable rather than slow.

What good hosting should include

The list below is the baseline in this decade. A host missing any of it is cheap for a reason, and the reason will show up at an inconvenient moment.

Ask what the support hours actually are as well. A host answering only on weekdays is a mismatch for a business that trades at weekends, and it is the kind of gap that shows up once.

• A secure certificate, issued and renewed automatically
• Daily backups you can restore yourself
• Security patching handled for you
• Support that answers within a stated time
• Enough storage and bandwidth for an image-heavy site
• A staging or preview option for changes
• No charge for ordinary traffic growth

Backups are the part that matters

Every host says it backs up. The question is how far back you can go and whether you can restore without asking anybody, and the answers vary enormously.

A backup nobody has restored is not a backup. Test one, once, on a site that is not live, and you will know whether the arrangement works before you need it.

Keep a copy somewhere other than the host holding the original, because a single provider losing both is rare and not impossible.

When hosting is included

Most website builders include it, which removes the separate bill and the separate supplier. Our page on builders with hosting covers what that usually covers and excludes.

The trade is that the site and the service become the same thing, so leaving means rebuilding rather than moving files to a new server.

For most small businesses that is the right arrangement, because the alternative requires somebody to take responsibility for a machine and usually nobody does.

What hosting cannot fix

A site that says nothing. Hosting affects whether pages arrive and how quickly, and it has no effect at all on whether they persuade anybody once they do.

It also does not affect search visibility directly beyond speed and availability. A site that is down repeatedly will suffer with a search engine and an answer engine alike; a site on a slightly slower host will not.

So buy reliable hosting, stop thinking about it, and spend the attention on the content. That is the honest allocation for almost every small business site.