Website hosting for small business, explained with nothing to sell you.
Hosting is the least interesting line item in running a small business website, and it is the one owners get quietly overcharged for. This is what I tell clients when they ask me what to buy, written out in full.
I design and hand-code websites from a studio in Aurora, IL, and every site I build has to live somewhere. So I pick the host, set the account up, tune it, and keep an eye on it afterward if the client wants that. What I will not do is sell you hosting from this page. There is not a single affiliate link on it and no provider is being pitched to you here. Your hosting is opened in your business name and billed to your card by the provider, and if you and I part ways on a Tuesday, it is still entirely yours on Wednesday.
Hosting is not one purchase. It is three, and they get confused constantly.
Almost every confused hosting conversation I have starts in the same place: the owner thinks they bought one thing when they actually bought three. Separating them takes a minute, and it makes the rest of this make sense.
The domain name is your address. It is yourbusiness.com, rented a year at a time from a registrar for a small annual fee. Nobody sells you a domain permanently. You hold it as long as you keep renewing, and whoever’s account it sits in is the one actually steering it.
The hosting is the lot the building sits on: a computer in a data center, running around the clock, keeping your pages ready for anyone who asks. You pay monthly or annually for a share of that machine plus somebody to look after it.
The website files are the building. The code, the images, the text, and, on WordPress, the database holding your pages and posts. This is the part you paid a designer to make. It is the most valuable of the three and the one most likely to be held hostage.
Here is why that matters more than it sounds like it should. These are three separate purchases and they can sit at three different companies. Domain at one registrar, site at a second, email at a third, all pointing at each other through DNS. That is a completely normal setup, and plenty of good businesses run exactly that way.
What matters is that you can log in to all three. The day you want to move hosts, redesign, or change who works on your site, it comes down to one question: do you control the accounts, or do you have to ask permission? Owners who can answer with a login move in an afternoon. Owners who cannot spend six weeks on email chains, and sometimes pay for a copy of a website they already bought.
- 1RegistrarCheck that the owner contact is your name and your email, not your designer’s.
- 2HostWhere the site runs. Easy to change, as long as the account is yours.
- 3FilesWhat you actually paid for. Get a copy and keep one of your own.
- 4MailUsually what breaks during a move. It has its own DNS records.
Not sure who is actually holding your domain? Send me the name and I will look it up for you.
Ask a Question →Eight things a small business site actually needs from a host.
Hosting companies compete on feature lists a hundred items long, and about eight of those items decide whether your site stays up and stays yours. This is what I check before putting a client’s site anywhere. It is not tied to any particular provider, because it should not be.
Uptime Somebody Is Actually Watching
Every host advertises high uptime. Almost none tell you when your site goes down, and those are different things. What you want is monitoring that checks the site every few minutes and emails a human when it stops answering. Without it, you find out you were offline all weekend when a customer mentions it Monday.
Backups You Can Restore Yourself
Ask two things: how far back do the backups go, and can I restore one at 9pm on a Saturday without opening a ticket? Daily backups with a one-click restore in your own control panel is the standard to hold out for. A backup you can only get through a paid support request is a safety net you cannot reach.
An SSL Certificate Included, Not Upsold
SSL is the padlock in the address bar, and browsers now put a warning in front of sites without one. Free, automatically renewing certificates have been standard for years, and any decent host includes and renews one at no charge. A provider selling certificates as a yearly add-on for a brochure site tells you how the rest of the bill is built.
Current PHP and Platform Versions
WordPress and most site software run on PHP, and old versions stop receiving security patches on a published schedule. A good host shows your version, lets you switch it, and warns you before an old one is retired. Old versions are slower too, which is a separate problem I wrote up in why your WordPress site is slow.
A Staging Copy
Staging is a private duplicate of your live site where changes get tested before customers see them. It is how a plugin update that would have broken your contact form gets caught on a copy instead of the real thing. Managed plans usually include it. Cheap shared plans often do not, and on a site that takes bookings, that gap is worth more than the price difference.
A Support Channel With Humans On It
Test this before you buy, not after something breaks. Ask a real technical question on chat during business hours, then try again at 10pm. You are measuring whether a person answers, whether they understood, and how long it took. Support is the biggest practical difference between two hosts at the same price, and the hardest thing to see on a pricing page.
Servers Reasonably Near Your Customers
Distance costs milliseconds. For a business selling to the Fox Valley and the western suburbs, a server in Chicago or the central United States loads noticeably faster than one in Europe, and a content delivery network handles the rest by caching images closer to whoever is reading. This matters most on phones running on cell data.
Renewal Pricing In Plain Numbers
The one that catches the most owners. Much of the industry advertises a discounted introductory rate, often on a multi-year prepayment, then renews at the standard price: year one at a few dollars a month, year two at three or four times that on the same plan. It is disclosed, in small print near the checkout. Find the renewal price, write it down, and ask whether you would sign up at that number, because that is the number you are agreeing to.
The important question is not which host. It is whose account it is.
I have inherited sites from a lot of situations, and the difference between a smooth handoff and a miserable one almost never comes down to the hosting company. It comes down to whether the business owner is the account holder. Two setups can cost the same every month and leave you in completely different positions the day you want to make a change.
The account is in somebody else’s name
- The domain is registered to the agency or the developer, with their email as owner contact
- Hosting is folded into a monthly marketing fee, so nobody can say what the hosting itself costs
- A “free website included” deal that stays free for exactly as long as you keep paying
- No login of your own, so you cannot see backups, DNS records, or renewal dates
- Leaving means requesting a copy of your own site, sometimes for a fee
- If the vendor closes, changes hands, or stops answering, recovery is slow and occasionally impossible
The account is yours from day one
- Registrar and host accounts opened in your business name, your email as owner contact
- Billed directly to your card by the provider, so you see the real price and renewal date
- You hold the registrar, host, and DNS logins, and can hand them to anyone you choose
- A line item you can read, question, and cancel, separate from anybody’s service fee
- Files, database, and domain move with you on your schedule, without asking permission
- Management is something you buy if you want it, like a care plan, not something holding the keys
// A NOTE ON FAIRNESS: plenty of decent people register domains in their own account because it was faster during a launch, with no bad intent at all. The problem is structural, not personal: an account in the wrong name becomes a problem the day somebody moves on or gets busy. Ask for the transfer in writing, politely. Most will do it the same week. The answer you get is itself useful information.
Paying a monthly fee and unsure what is inside it? I will read the invoice with you.
Get in Touch →Buy hosting for the site you have. Not for the site a sales page imagined.
Most small businesses are either overbuying or underbuying, and both cost money. The decision is simpler than the marketing makes it look: how much work does your site do on every visit, and what does it cost you when it is down for an hour? Answer those two and the plan mostly picks itself.
A Five-Page Site
Home, services, about, contact, one gallery. Nothing calculates on the fly. Entry-level shared hosting, or static hosting if the site is hand-coded, is genuinely enough. Nobody needs to sell you a server for this.
Plugins, Forms, Traffic
Twenty pages, a blog, a booking form, a dozen plugins, real daily visitors. This is where managed WordPress earns its higher price: caching, staging, updates, and support that knows the platform.
Portals and Stores
Customer logins, inventory, payments, scheduled jobs, anything with a database working hard. A VPS or cloud instance, sized to the load and monitored properly. More control, and more responsibility.
What It Should Cost
A domain runs roughly $15 to $25 a year. Typical small business hosting runs roughly $60 to $400 a year, depending on which case you are in. Well outside that range is worth a question.
Both ends of that range are real. Basic shared hosting for a small brochure site genuinely costs a few dollars a month and is fine for the job, and the trap down there is not quality, it is the renewal cliff in WO.08 and the add-ons waiting at checkout. At the other end, a managed plan in the low hundreds per year buys caching, staging, security scanning, and support staffed by people who work on the platform all day. For a business whose site books appointments, that is cheap next to one bad afternoon offline.
Free tiers deserve one honest paragraph. Free static hosting is legitimate technology and plenty of serious sites run on it. It suits hand-coded sites with no server-side moving parts, and it is fast. What it does not come with is support, a phone number, or any promise about tomorrow. Free hosting bundled into a website builder is a different animal: your address is usually a subdomain of their brand, and the site often cannot be exported anywhere else at all.
And the part nobody enjoys hearing: a slow site is more often the site’s fault than the host’s. Oversized images, too many plugins, and bloated page-builder markup will crawl on excellent hardware. Upgrading hosting to fix a slow website is the most common expensive mistake I run into, which is why I ask to look at the site before anybody changes plans.
I set hosting up. The account is yours from the first click.
A lot of pages ranking for hosting advice are written to move you toward one provider. This one is not. There is no affiliate link anywhere on it and no host is being pitched to you, because the useful thing here is the checklist above, not a brand name. If you take that checklist and buy from whichever provider wins on it, that is exactly the outcome I want. Referral arrangements are disclosed at the foot of this page.
What actually happens on a build is this. We talk about what the site needs to do, and I recommend a class of hosting plus two or three providers that fit, with the reasons written out. You open the account in your business name, your email as owner contact, your card paid directly to the provider. I will sit on a screen share and walk through the signup, or set it up with you present, but the account is yours from the first click. So is the domain, registered to you, at a registrar you can log in to.
Then I do the part you are hiring me for: configuring the server, setting PHP and caching correctly, installing and testing the certificate, pointing DNS without breaking your email, setting up backups, and confirming the whole thing is monitored. That work is included in the build. Every build also comes with 90 days of post-launch edits, and hosting questions during that window count.
After 90 days, ongoing management is optional. If you want me watching updates, backups, uptime, and security every month, that is a website care plan, from $85 a month, and you can start or stop one whenever you like. Plenty of clients handle it themselves and email me when something looks odd. Both are fine. What does not happen is your hosting quietly becoming the thing that keeps you subscribed. If you leave, you take all of it: domain, hosting account, files, database, images, handed over without a fee or an argument. Build pricing is published: $750 for a five-page Launch, $1,500 for Growth, from $3,000 for Custom, extra pages $130. None of it is hosting, because hosting is not mine to sell.
// Why say all of this out loud Most pages ranking for hosting advice are compensated for the recommendation they make, and the honest ones disclose it. I would rather publish the version that hands you the checklist and lets you buy from whichever provider wins on it. If that ends with you on a host I never mentioned, the page still did its job.
Moving hosts is routine. Losing email during the move is the real risk.
A migration done properly has no downtime at all, because the old site keeps serving visitors the whole time the new one is being built and checked. The order of operations is what makes that true. Copy the files and database to the new host first. Bring the copy up on a temporary address and test it properly: every page, every form, the checkout if there is one, the images, the redirects. Only when it genuinely works do you touch DNS.
Before that switch, lower the TTL on your DNS records a day ahead. TTL is how long the rest of the internet is allowed to remember your old address, and shortening it from a day to a few minutes means the change spreads in minutes instead of trickling out over 48 hours. Then point the A record at the new server, watch both sides for errors, and leave the old hosting paid up for two weeks. Canceling it the same afternoon is how people discover the one thing nobody tested.
Now the trap, and it catches people constantly. If your email runs on the same domain as your website, mail is routed by DNS records (the MX records, plus SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) that sit right beside the website records. Move hosting carelessly and those get replaced with the new host’s defaults. The site comes up fine, so the migration looks successful, while mail is delivered into an empty mailbox on a server nobody is watching. It can be a day before anyone notices the inbox went quiet, and messages sent in that window are often unrecoverable.
Prevention is unglamorous and takes ten minutes: export the full DNS zone before changing anything, note every MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC record exactly as it stands, and re-enter them after the switch. If your mail is with a separate provider, which for most businesses it should be, leave the mail records untouched and change only the website records. Then send a test message in both directions before telling anyone the move is done. Same order every time, and it is uneventful. Uneventful is the goal.
Hosting questions, answered straight.
Want a second opinion on what you are paying for?
Send me your domain and whatever you are billed each month, and I will tell you what is actually hosting, what is a service fee, and whether the accounts are in your name. That costs nothing and there is no product waiting at the end of it. If you also want a website built, the rate card is published and the quote comes in writing before any work starts. Prefer to talk it through? Call (331) 269-6120 and you get me, not a sales team.
// DISCLOSURE: Some of the hosts I recommend to clients on a build pay me a referral fee. There is no affiliate link anywhere on this page and no host is recommended on it. If I suggest a specific host to you directly, I will tell you then whether I have an arrangement with them.