How to choose web hosting

Hosting comparison pages favour feature grids: forty rows of checkmarks that all look alike. The decision is smaller than that. Three questions determine which rung of the hosting ladder a site belongs on, and everything else is detail.

Question 1: what is being run?

A WordPress site, a custom application and an online store are three different hosting problems. WordPress runs anywhere and runs best where it is the speciality, from shared plans to managed WordPress tiers. Custom applications in Node, Python or containers want real infrastructure: a VPS or cloud instances where the developer controls the runtime. A store deserves a decision of its own, hosted platform or self-hosted commerce, which the e-commerce hosting guide walks through.

Question 2: who operates the server?

Somebody patches the system, watches the monitoring and answers when it breaks; the only question is whether that somebody is the owner, a platform or a provider's engineers. Managed hosting looks expensive next to raw servers, but the true alternative is the owner's weekends, not a cheaper server. The managed vs unmanaged guide prices that trade.

Question 3: what does failure cost?

An hour of downtime on a portfolio costs embarrassment; on a revenue site it has a number. That number, not ambition, is what justifies climbing rungs: dedicated resources, real SLAs, support contracts with response times. Sites with a low cost of failure belong low on the ladder, and no rung is a poor place to be.

The common traps

• Buying for the imagined future: renting capacity for traffic that has not arrived. The ladder is there to be climbed when evidence arrives, and migrations are routine.
• Comparing introductory prices: entry rates assume multi-year terms and jump at renewal. The number that matters is the renewal rate.
• Treating uptime marketing as engineering: a 99.9 per cent guarantee is a credit policy, not a promise. The SLA says what is counted.
• Letting the host own the domain: the domain stays in the owner's registrar account, always. It is what makes every other decision reversible.

The pick for each answer

A first WordPress site with no appetite for operations: shared hosting, Bluehost. Outgrown shared hosting, still no appetite for operations: managed cloud, Cloudways. Business-critical, or serious WooCommerce: managed infrastructure, Liquid Web. A developer with a custom stack: the cloud, raw, DigitalOcean. Still undecided: the matchmaker asks these three questions.