What Web Hosting Actually Buys You

What the plan tells you

Disk space, bandwidth, number of sites, number of mailboxes, and increasingly the word unlimited beside several of them.

For a small business website, none of these is the binding constraint. A brochure site with a few dozen photographs occupies a fraction of the smallest plan on offer.

Which means the comparison table is mostly comparing things that do not matter to you, in a way that makes the cheapest option look identical to the expensive one.

What actually differs

What unlimited means

It means there is no number in the marketing, not that there is no limit.

Every host has a fair use policy, and it exists because a genuinely unlimited plan would be unworkable. The limits are real and expressed in terms you will not see until you approach them: processes, memory, database queries, files.

For an ordinary small business site none of this matters, and that is exactly why unlimited can be offered. The plans are sized for what most customers actually use.

Where it becomes a problem is a site that grows, gets busy, or runs something heavier than expected. Then a limit you were told did not exist turns out to.

The questions worth asking

1. What does this cost at renewal, not in the first year.
2. Are backups taken, how often, and can I restore one myself?
3. What are the actual resource limits behind the word unlimited.
4. Where are the servers?
5. What is the support channel and what hours?
6. Is there a staging area for testing changes.

The second is the one that matters most and is asked least. A backup you cannot restore without opening a ticket is a backup that helps somebody else.

A worked example

A retailer paying a very low monthly figure for hosting, happily, for two years.

The site was slow, which everybody attributed to the site itself. It was rebuilt, lighter and better, and remained slow.

The cause was the hosting. The plan was on an oversubscribed shared machine, and the site was spending most of its time waiting rather than working.

Moving to a modestly better plan, at roughly three times the price, took the page load from around six seconds to under two. The difference in annual cost was less than one order's margin.

Two years of a slow site had been bought to save an amount the business would not have noticed spending.

Shared, virtual and dedicated

The three tiers, in the terms the invoice uses.

Shared means many sites on one machine, sharing its resources. Cheapest, and your performance depends partly on what your neighbours are doing.

Virtual private means a guaranteed slice of a machine. More predictable, more expensive, and it usually assumes you can manage a server or are paying somebody who can.

Dedicated means the whole machine. Rarely relevant to a small business site and frequently sold to one anyway.

For a brochure site or a small shop, good shared hosting is the correct answer. The upgrade that actually helps is usually a better shared plan rather than a jump to a virtual server nobody is going to administer.

Where the money is worth spending

Being specific, because more expensive is not automatically better.

Worth paying for: solid state storage, a host that publishes what its limits actually are, backups you control, support that answers within the hour, and renewal pricing that is not a surprise.

Rarely worth paying for at small business scale: enormous disk allowances, features aimed at developers you will never use, and plans sized for traffic you do not have.

The sensible position is the second-cheapest tier from a host with a reputation, rather than the cheapest tier from anybody.

Where the servers are

Worth a moment because it affects two separate things.

Speed, because distance adds delay. For a business serving one Canadian city, a server in Canada or the northern United States is materially faster than one in Europe.

And data location, which matters if you hold customer information and have said anything about where it lives.

Neither is decisive on its own, and both are easy to check before signing rather than after.

What you are not buying

A common misunderstanding worth clearing up.

Hosting does not include somebody maintaining your site, updating it, fixing it when it breaks, or being responsible if it does. The host is responsible for the machine and the connection.

If your site stops working because of something in the site, that is yours to sort out. Many businesses discover this distinction during their first outage.

Which is worth knowing when comparing a low hosting price against an arrangement that includes maintenance. They are not the same product.

Signing up sensibly

Three habits that save trouble later.

Pay monthly for the first few months rather than committing to three years for the discount. The discount is real and so is the difficulty of leaving a host you have prepaid.

Use an email address at a domain you control, not one provided by the host. Otherwise a dispute with the host is also a dispute about your ability to receive their password reset.

And note the renewal date somewhere you will see it, alongside the domain expiry. Those two dates are the ones that take a business offline, and neither announces itself.

The distinction between hosting and the address that points at it is covered in domains and hosting, explained once.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.