Web hosting is renting space on a computer that stores your website's files and hands them to anyone who visits — typically $2–$30 a month for a small business (Forbes, 2026). Your domain is the address and hosting is the building: you can change buildings any time without changing the address. And the lighter your site, the less building you need.
Your website is a folder of files; hosting is the machine that serves them
Every website is, underneath, a folder: pages, images, a little code. Those files have to live on a computer that never switches off and never loses its connection, so that when somebody visits, the machine hands the files over instantly. That computer is called a server. Renting room on one is web hosting — that's the entire product. Control panels, one-click installs, and email add-ons are packaging around that one job.
Three kinds of hosting, translated into owner words
Hosting companies sell dozens of plan names. Nearly all of them reduce to three:
| Shared | Managed | Static files | |
|---|---|---|---|
| In plain terms | One building, many tenants | The landlord also does the maintenance | Just files — no machinery to maintain |
| What you're paying for | The room | The room plus a caretaker (updates, backups) | Almost nothing — plain files are cheap to serve |
| Right when | A typical small-business site on a platform | You're on WordPress and never want to think about updates | Your site is plain code you own — like every site we ship |
Whatever the label on the plan, small-business hosting lands at $2–$30 a month (Forbes, 2026). Above that you're paying for scale or for someone else's attention, not for a different internet.
The two gotchas nobody prints on the pricing page
The renewal jump. The price that got you in the door is usually an introductory price; the renewal is the real one. Before you buy, ask what the same plan costs when it renews — in writing. Honest hosts answer plainly.
Support quality. Hosting is a commodity right up until your site is down on a busy morning. Then the product is whether a human answers, and how fast. You can test this before paying: send a pre-sales question and time the reply — it's the truest preview of the support you'll get as a customer.
A light site runs fast on almost any host
Heavy platform sites make the server work for every visitor — assembling pages, querying databases, running plugins. A light static site asks the server to do almost nothing: hand over a few small files. That's why plain-code sites feel quick even on inexpensive hosting, and why a slow site is more often a heavy site than a bad host. The stakes are real: 53% of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load (Google, 2016). Upgrading hosting to rescue a heavy site is renting a bigger building for furniture that shouldn't have shipped.
Most hosting advice is brand-picking. The bigger lever is what you host: light, plain files are fast and cheap everywhere — and they demote the hosting decision from scary to boring.
When you can ignore all of this
- You're on a website builder. Hosting is bundled into the subscription and invisible. That's genuinely fine while you're happy there — this guide matters the day you want code you can move.
- Someone already manages it and it works. If an agency or webmaster keeps your site up and the bill is sane, switching hosts to save a little is rarely worth the risk of the move.
- Your site is genuinely complex. Online stores, member areas, and booking systems have real server needs — that's a different conversation than this guide covers.
Where we fit
We don't sell hosting on its own, which keeps us honest about it. What we ship is the light kind of site: your existing website recreated as clean vanilla HTML/CSS/JS on one of 6,600+ templates — code you own under every tier, hostable anywhere. $49 gets the code same day; $99 adds 3 revision rounds at the standard 48 hours. And if you'd rather never think about servers at all, the $249 tier combines up to 3 templates, gives you 5 revision rounds, and includes hosting, SSL, and domain — live in 7 days.
Curious what your site looks like as the light kind? Give us your web address and we rebuild it free, using your own content and photos, as a working page you can edit and publish in one click. No card. Get the free preview →
Frequently asked questions
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