Best Web Hosting & Website Tools

Choosing a host: what actually varies

Hosting is the category where advertised prices least resemble what you pay. Shared hosts commonly quote a heavily discounted first term and renew at two to four times that rate, so the renewal price — not the headline — is the number worth comparing. Where we list an entry price, it is the ongoing rate wherever the vendor publishes one.

The four groups below represent genuinely different trade-offs. Managed WordPress hosts handle updates, caching, and backups for you, and charge for that labour; they suit people who would rather not administer a server. VPS and cloud hosting gives you the machine and expects you to manage it, which costs less per unit of capacity and more in attention. Site builders bundle hosting with the editor so there is no separate host at all — the trade is portability, since your site is difficult to move afterwards. The use-case group cuts across the others.

Beyond price, the specifications that tend to matter in practice are storage and bandwidth limits and what happens when you exceed them, how many sites one plan covers, whether backups are automatic and how far back they reach, where the data centres are relative to your visitors, and whether migration from your current host is included or billed. Support hours matter more than they sound: a host with business-hours-only support behaves very differently at 2am.

For anything handling payments or personal data, check the provider's published uptime commitment and what it actually pays out — most credit a small fraction of the monthly fee, which is not the same as a guarantee.