Hosting is a service that rents you space on a server where your website files are stored: the code, the images, the database. When someone types your address into a browser, the request goes to that server and it sends the page back. No hosting, no website — the domain simply points at nothing.
Hosting is always paid for and always someone's responsibility. It can be a traditional provider with a control panel, or a cloud platform such as Vercel or Cloudflare where you never see a server at all — only a deployment and a connected domain. The difference between those options is measured not just in price, but in how fast the site is and who gets woken up when it goes down.
Below: what hosting actually includes, how it differs from a domain, which types exist, what they cost, and how to avoid the two most expensive traps.
In plain words: the domain is the address, hosting is the premises
Think of a website as a shop. The domain is the address on the sign: 1 High Street. Hosting is the premises themselves — walls, lights, shelves, floor space. You can own the address without renting premises, and visitors arrive at an empty plot. You can rent premises without an address, and nobody knows how to find you.
The analogy holds further than you would expect. A desk in a co-working space is shared hosting: cheap, but the neighbours are noisy. A private office is a VPS. Your own building is a dedicated server. Cloud hosting is renting exactly as much floor space as you used today.
The address side of this is covered separately in what is a domain.
What hosting actually includes
- Disk space — room for files, images and the database.
- CPU and RAM — these decide how many simultaneous visitors the site handles before it starts crawling.
- Bandwidth — how much data the server may send per month. Cheap plans cap it and bill the overage separately.
- An SSL certificate — encryption and the padlock in the browser. It is free almost everywhere now; you should not be paying extra for it.
- Backups — daily copies of the site. Worth paying for, and precisely what the cheapest plans leave out.
- Support — an actual human who replies when the site goes down at 11pm on a Friday.
Then there is uptime — the share of time the site is reachable. A sensible figure is 99.9% or better, which is up to 44 minutes of downtime a month. 99% sounds almost identical but works out at roughly seven hours a month, and they will land at the worst possible moment.
Types of hosting, and what they cost
| Type | Best for | Typical price/mo | When you outgrow it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared | A brochure site, a blog, a small services site with up to a few thousand visits a month | $2–10 | As soon as you add a catalogue, a basket or pass 10,000 visits — the site slows down because of its server neighbours |
| VPS | Online stores, database-heavy sites, custom CMS builds — anywhere you need control of the server | $10–60 | When traffic peaks start taking the server down and nobody is left to administer it |
| Dedicated server | Large portals, strict security requirements, or data that must sit in a specific country | $80–300 | Rarely outgrown — more often deliberately traded for cloud, for flexibility and cost |
| Cloud / serverless (Vercel, Cloudflare, Netlify) | Modern Next.js sites: landing pages, corporate sites, stores with an external backend | $0–40, entry tiers are free | Effectively never: scaling is automatic and the bill grows with traffic |
Site builders (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify) are a category of their own: hosting is baked into the subscription and cannot be bought separately. The price of that convenience is that you cannot simply pick the site up and move it elsewhere. We covered that trade-off in our comparison with site builders.
Domain versus hosting
They are two separate services and can be bought from two different companies. A domain is rented from a registrar by the year — a .com runs about $12 a year, country domains $10–20. Hosting is paid separately, monthly or annually. DNS connects the two: in the domain's settings you point visitors at a particular server.
The practical consequence: keep the domain in your own name and you can move the site to another host in an evening, with visitors none the wiser. Lose it to an unpaid renewal invoice and you lose the address, even though every file is intact. Renewal reminders should reach the business owner, not an account manager who left two years ago.
What hosting really affects
Hosting is not the line item to optimise down to zero. It moves three things you can see in the numbers.
Speed
Time to first byte is the head start — or handicap — every page gets before the browser draws anything at all. Cheap shared hosting in another country easily returns 600–900 ms. A cloud platform with a CDN serving the page from the node nearest the visitor returns 50–150 ms. No amount of image compression or clean code makes up that gap.
Uptime
An hour of downtime for a store is lost orders; for a clinic it is calls that went to a competitor. Google notices too: if its crawler hits server errors several times in a row, the page can drop out of the index, and getting it back takes weeks.
Core Web Vitals
Google measures speed on real visitors, not in a lab. LCP — how long the largest element takes to appear — depends directly on how quickly the server returned the HTML. What the metrics are and where to read them is covered in what are Core Web Vitals, and the effect of a speed fix on actual enquiries is in our write-up on medical website speed.
Where we host, and whose name the accounts are in
We deploy to Vercel and Cloudflare. The reasoning is practical: Next.js sites are served from a global network, static assets are cached at the edge, and a traffic spike requires nothing from the owner.
The first year of hosting is included in the build package: we cover the cost, the domain setup, SSL and monitoring while the site finds its footing. After that the accounts are handed over — Vercel or Cloudflare and the domain registrar are put in your name and your email, you see the invoices, and you can move to another agency whenever you like. It is the honest arrangement and, frankly, the less profitable one for us: it gives up a convenient lever. But a website you cannot log into is not an asset you own.
If you would rather not administer any of it, that is what support is for — £200/month or £40/hour: updates, backups, uptime monitoring, domain renewals handled on time. What a build includes and what the packages cost is on the pricing page.
Three mistakes that get expensive
- Cheap shared hosting under an online store. A 2,000-product catalogue on a $3 plan works right up until you point advertising at it. The site falls over on Black Friday — exactly when you need it. The gap between shared and a VPS is about $30 a month, against a day of revenue.
- Hosting and domain registered to the agency. The classic: the site was built five years ago, the developer has vanished, nobody has the logins, and the domain expires next month. Recovering access costs weeks of correspondence and sometimes ends in rebuilding the site on a new domain. Check this today, not on the day you need it.
- Skipping backups and monitoring. A $3 plan has neither daily copies nor an alert when the site goes down. You find out the site has been offline for two days from a customer — and that is the good outcome.
Hosting is boring infrastructure, which is why it gets thought about last. It is also the foundation: on a slow, unreliable server, neither the SEO nor the ads nor the design you paid for does its job.
