Where should your website actually live. A hosting guide for small and medium businesses.

Most clients arrive expecting a one-line answer. There isn't one. Shared, static, serverless, container hosting compared. How we pick on a real project.

Most discovery calls include the same question. Where will the website live. Most clients expect a single-word answer. There isn't one. The right host changes with the kind of site you have. The team that will run it after launch. The stage of business you're in. Here's how we decide.

First, what a host actually does. A web host is the company whose servers physically run your website code so customers can load the page. Differences come down to four things. Where the servers are. How fast each server responds. What software is set up to run. What happens when traffic spikes. Pick wrong, the site is slow or brittle. Pick right, you can mostly forget about hosting for years.

The four categories.

Shared and managed WordPress hosting. SiteGround. Bluehost. WP Engine. Kinsta. The host runs WordPress for you. Their support staff are WordPress specialists. Right for small business content sites already on WordPress. Wrong if performance matters or you're outgrowing the platform. The migration cost when you outgrow it is real.

Static or Jamstack hosting. Vercel. Netlify. Cloudflare Pages. Built for sites compiled to static files, served from an edge network close to your customer. Sub-second loads almost everywhere in the world. Free or near-free at small scale. Doesn't run WordPress. Right for marketing sites built in modern stacks like Next.js or Astro. This is what we use most often.

Serverless edge runtime. Cloudflare Workers. Vercel functions. Deno Deploy. Same global edge as static, with code execution per request. Useful when your site does real backend work. Authentication. Payments. Dynamic personalisation. Search. Slightly more expensive than pure static. Far cheaper than running traditional servers.

VPS plus container hosting. DigitalOcean. AWS. Hetzner. You rent a Linux server. You decide what runs on it. The do-it-yourself tier. Great for highly custom apps. Overkill for marketing sites. Expensive in human time even when cheap in dollars.

Matching the host to the site.

A solo consultant launching a portfolio. Static hosting on Vercel. Free. Fast. Done.

A regional shop running a content blog plus a contact form. Static hosting plus a lightweight CMS. Total cost under €20 a month.

A growing ecommerce brand on Shopify. Shopify hosts the storefront for you. Don't over-engineer it.

A B2B SaaS marketing site needing CRM integration. Static hosting plus serverless functions for the integration layer.

A complex internal application with fifteen integrations. Managed cloud or VPS. Expect a real DevOps line item.

Cost reality. Most clients underestimate hosting cost over five years. They overestimate it for one. Static hosting is free at small scale. Affordable at much larger scale. WordPress hosting starts around €10 a month then creeps up as traffic plus plugin count grow. Container hosting looks cheap then becomes expensive once you add monitoring, backups, security patching. Total cost of ownership matters more than the headline rate.

Where Whitelam Media usually lands. For marketing sites we build, the default is Vercel for the website plus your existing host for email. Cheap. Fast. Almost zero ongoing maintenance. We pick differently when there's a reason. WordPress already running well, leave it alone. Ecommerce, WooCommerce on a managed WordPress host, or a custom headless storefront on Next.js plus Stripe. Complex client portal, hybrid of static plus serverless.

The non-obvious thing. Hosting choice plus stack choice are linked. Choosing a host before you choose a stack puts the cart in front of the horse. We have the stack discussion first. The host falls out of that.

What you actually need to ask any host. Three questions cut through marketing language. Where physically are your servers, plus is one close to my customers. What are the limits before I have to upgrade. What happens if I want to leave. Can I export cleanly. To what.

The right hosting decision is rarely interesting. It's a small-cost foundational choice that determines whether your site is fast, cheap to run, easy to keep running. Get it right early. We make this call for you on every project. The reasoning gets written up so you understand it.