Hosting looks like a commodity. Four dollars a month, unlimited everything, and a green tick. It is priced like storage and sold like storage, and that is why so many small business sites are slow, occasionally offline, and eventually compromised.
Here is what the job actually involves.
Keeping the site up
Everyone advertises high uptime. The number is less interesting than what happens during the gap.
The questions worth asking:
- When it goes down, how do you find out? If the answer is “a customer calls,” you have no monitoring.
- Is anyone watching, or does someone notice on Monday?
- If the server has a hardware failure, is there a plan or is it a rebuild?
For most small business sites a few minutes of downtime a month is harmless. What hurts is four hours on a weekday because nobody noticed until lunchtime.
Being fast enough where your customers are
A cheap plan often means hundreds of sites on one machine, competing for the same processor. Your site is fast when the others are quiet and slow when one of them gets busy. You cannot see this from your side, you only see inconsistency.
Distance matters too. A server in another region adds delay to every request. For a business serving three counties, hosting on the other side of the world is a self-inflicted handicap.
The practical test: load your site from a phone on cellular, away from your office, several times across a week. Consistency tells you more than any advertised speed.
Security patching, which is the real work
This is the part that separates hosting from storage.
The software running your site needs patching. The system underneath it needs patching. If you run a content management system, that and every extension needs patching. Skip this long enough and you will be compromised, not maybe.
What being compromised looks like for a small business: your site quietly starts serving spam links to search engines while looking normal to you. You find out when your listings drop, or when a browser starts warning visitors. Cleanup costs more than several years of decent hosting.
So the question for any host or care plan is simply: who applies updates, and how quickly? Three answers:
- You do. Fine if you will. Most people will not.
- Automatically, by the host. Good, as long as something checks the site still works afterward. An update that breaks a page at two in the morning is only better than no update if someone notices.
- Someone applies and checks them. The most expensive and the one that actually works.
Backups you could restore
A backup you have never restored is a belief, not a backup. Covered properly in its own article, but for hosting the questions are: how often, how far back can you go, are they stored somewhere other than the same server, and can you get a copy without asking anyone.
That last one matters. Backups you cannot download are backups your host controls.
A certificate, and a plan for renewing it
Every site needs one, they are free, and they expire. When one lapses, every visitor gets a full-page browser warning telling them your site is not safe.
This should be automatic. Ask whether it renews on its own, and ask what happened the last time one did not.
Someone to ask
The thing you are actually buying at the higher price levels is a person.
Test it before you commit. Send a real question through support before you are a customer, or during your first week. Time the reply and read it. You will learn more from that than from any feature table.
For a business whose site takes inquiries, “we will look at it Monday” is a different product from “we are looking at it now,” and the difference is worth more than three dollars a month.
What the cheap plans leave out
Not lying, just quiet:
- Unlimited usually means until you use enough to be noticed.
- Free migration often means one site, one time, sometimes by an automated tool.
- Daily backups may be kept for a week, on the same server, and may be a paid extra to restore.
- Support may be a chat window that suggests upgrading.
- The renewal price is often three times the first year. Check it before you sign, not eleven months later.
Matching the plan to the site
A static site, where pages are built ahead of time, has almost no attack surface and can be hosted on services that are fast, cheap, and nearly maintenance free. If your site does not need to run software for each visitor, this is the easiest good decision available.
A content management system needs a host that handles the updates, or a care plan that does. This is where most small business sites are, and where most of them are underserved.
An application with logins and a database needs real infrastructure and someone who understands it. Do not run this on a shared plan.
Deciding in fifteen minutes
Ask your current host, or the one you are considering, four questions:
- Who applies security updates to my site, and how often?
- Where are backups stored, how long are they kept, and can I download one myself?
- How do I reach a human on a Sunday morning?
- What is the renewal price?
Four straight answers means you can stop looking. Vagueness on any of them, particularly the first, tells you what you are actually buying.
