Hosting a website is an hour's work — not a profession

Pick the host for boring reasons, not the homepage

Hosting homepages all promise the same speed and the same awards. Choose on three duller criteria instead:

• Reachable support. Send a pre-sales question before you pay and time the answer. That reply is the truest preview of the day your site goes down.
• SSL on by default. The padlock in the browser bar should be included and automatic, not an upsell or a setup project.
• Fair renewals. The advertised price is usually an introductory one. Ask what the plan costs when it renews, in writing, before you buy.

We keep a fuller buying checklist in our small-business hosting guide; these three cover most of it.

Point the domain — DNS is one setting, not a discipline

DNS is the setting inside your domain account that tells the internet which computer holds your site. Your new host gives you the values to paste in, and then you wait a short while for the change to spread. That's the entire step. One habit worth keeping: leave the domain registered in your own account and point it at the host rather than transferring it to them — the address should stay yours.

Upload the files — you're copying, not coding

Every host offers a file manager or an upload panel. Your site's folder goes up exactly as it sits on your computer: pages, images, code. With a plain-code site nothing installs, nothing compiles, and there's no database to configure — the folder is the website. This is the step people fear most, and it's the most anticlimactic: it feels like attaching files to an email.

Verify on a phone, on mobile data — not your office Wi-Fi

Open your domain on a phone with Wi-Fi off, like a customer in a parking lot. Tap every menu item. Submit the contact form to yourself. Check the padlock. Then feel the load time the way an impatient stranger would — 53% of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load (Google, 2016). If the site passes on a phone on mobile data, it passes everywhere.

When something breaks, the symptom names the step

The nice thing about a four-step path is that each failure points at its own step:

• Nothing loads at your domain. That's the pointing step — DNS values entered wrong, or the change simply hasn't finished spreading. Re-check the values against what the host gave you, then give it time before touching anything else.
• The site loads but the padlock is missing. That's the host's SSL — usually one switch in its dashboard, and a support question if you can't find it. You chose them for reachable support; this is the moment to use it.
• An old version keeps showing. Your files didn't fully upload, or your browser is remembering the previous visit. Re-upload, then check from a different device before assuming the worst.
• Pages load but the contact form doesn't send. Forms are the one part of a site that isn't just files — the form needs a service behind it, and your host or site builder will have wired one. Test it end to end; a silent dead form is the most expensive quiet failure a business site can have.

With a builder you never do any of this — and that can be fine

Website builders bundle hosting, domain, and editor into one subscription; the four steps above simply don't exist there. If you're on a builder and happy, this guide isn't homework. The trade is portability:

Where we fit

Every site we ship is built for exactly this path: your existing website recreated as clean vanilla HTML/CSS/JS you own — a folder any host can serve. $49 buys the code, delivered same day; $99 adds 3 detailed revision rounds at the standard 48 hours. And if you'd rather skip all four steps, the $249 tier combines up to 3 templates with 5 revision rounds, and we handle hosting, SSL, and domain, live in 7 days. Everything starts from a library of 6,600+ designs that grows daily, and a free rebuild of your site as a real page you can edit and publish in one click, no credit card.

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Frequently asked questions