Where should your website live? A hosting guide for small & mid-size firms.

Most owners expect a one-word answer to where their website should be hosted. There isn't one. We compare shared WordPress hosting, static hosting, serverless platforms and renting your own server, and explain how we choose.

Most first calls include the same question: where will the website live? Most owners expect a one-word answer. There isn't one. The right host depends on the kind of site you have, who will run it after launch and how much it has to do. This is how we decide.

A host is the company whose computers run your site.

A web host runs your website on its servers so visitors can load it. Hosts differ in four ways: where the servers are, how fast they respond, what software they run and what happens when traffic jumps. Pick wrong and the site is slow or breaks under load. Pick right and you can mostly forget about hosting for years.

There are four main kinds of hosting.

Shared and managed WordPress hosting. SiteGround, Bluehost, WP Engine and Kinsta run WordPress for you, and their support staff know it well. It suits small content sites already on WordPress. It suits you less if speed matters or you're outgrowing the platform, and moving off it later is real work.

Static hosting. Vercel, Netlify and Cloudflare serve pages that are built ahead of time, from a network of locations close to each visitor. Pages load quickly almost everywhere, and small sites cost little or nothing. It doesn't run WordPress. It suits sites built with modern tools like Next.js or Astro.

Serverless platforms. The same networks can also run code for each visitor, for logins, payments, search or a contact form that talks to your CRM. It costs a little more than static hosting and far less effort than looking after your own servers. Most of the sites we build use static pages with some serverless code.

Your own server. DigitalOcean, AWS and Hetzner rent you a server and you decide what runs on it. It's right for unusual custom applications. For a company website it's more than you need: cheap in dollars and expensive in people's time.

Match the host to the site.

• A consultant launching a portfolio: static hosting. Free or close to it, and fast.
• A regional firm with a blog and a contact form: static hosting plus an editor for the content.
• A store on Shopify: Shopify hosts it for you. Don't overthink it.
• A company site that sends inquiries to a CRM: static hosting plus serverless code for the connection.
• A complex internal application with many connections: a managed cloud or your own server, with someone paid to look after it.

Add up five years of cost before you choose.

Most owners overestimate what hosting costs in the first year and underestimate it over five. Static hosting is free at small scale. Cheap WordPress hosting creeps up as traffic grows and premium plugins add their own yearly fees. Your own server looks cheap until you add monitoring, backups and security updates. The monthly price on the host's website is only part of the bill. If your site sits on cheap shared hosting today, we look at whether that's holding it back in a separate guide.

What we usually choose.

For the sites we build, the default is Vercel for the website, a Neon database for the content and your existing provider for email. It's fast, cheap to run and needs little looking after. Hosting and support come with every site we build, from $150 a month, and cover hosting, monitoring, backups and security updates (see pricing).

We choose differently when there's a reason. If your WordPress site runs well, we'll tell you to leave it where it is. A move is worth it when the site is slow, hard to update or running on software that no longer gets security fixes, and that's what our website rebuilds are for.

Choose the platform first and the host follows.

Hosting and platform are linked. Pick the host before the platform and you may end up choosing twice. We settle the platform first, and our guide to choosing a platform covers that step.

Ask any host three questions.

• Where are your servers, and is one close to my customers?
• What limits will I hit before I have to upgrade?
• If I leave, can I take everything with me, and in what form?

Hosting is rarely exciting. It's a small cost that decides whether your site is fast, cheap to run and easy to keep running, so it's worth getting right early.