Hosting is the service that stores your site and hands it to visitors. When somebody taps your listing, their browser asks a server for the page, and hosting decides how quickly that server answers — or whether it answers at all. It is usually treated as a line item and occasionally turns out to be a business decision.
Briefly explained
- The service that stores your site and delivers it to visitors.
- It sets the floor on how fast any page can be.
- It is tested hardest exactly when demand spikes.
- The account should be in your name, not your developer’s.
What are the options, in practice?
Broadly three tiers, though the names get used loosely.
- Shared: Many sites on one server. Cheap, and the speed depends on what everyone else on that server is doing.
- Managed: Updates, backups and monitoring included, with performance tuned for one platform. More predictable, more expensive.
- Edge or cloud: Content served from locations near the visitor. Fast by design, and increasingly the default for new builds.
When does it stop being an IT question?
Two moments, and both arrive on the day you can least afford them.
- The urgent mobile search. A slow first response loses the call before the page renders. See Core Web Vitals.
- The surge. A storm, a freeze, a heat wave. Traffic multiplies exactly when the work is worth most, and cheap shared hosting is where sites fall over.
What should you look for?
- Fast server response, from infrastructure near your customers
- Automatic daily backups you have actually tested restoring from
- SSL, updates and monitoring included rather than sold separately
- Somebody reachable when the site is down, in your own working hours
Who should own the account?
You, without exception.
Hosting, domain and analytics accounts belong in the business’s name, with the owner holding access, whoever administers them day to day. Hosting held hostage by a former developer is a recurring and entirely avoidable problem, and it is only ever discovered at the worst possible moment.
What do the terms mean?
- TTFB: Time to first byte. How long the server takes to start answering.
- Uptime: The share of time the site is reachable.
- CDN: A network serving your files from locations near the visitor.
- SSL certificate: What makes the address secure. Expected, not optional.
- Staging site: A copy for testing changes. Keep it out of search results.
Owner questions
