{"id":8056,"date":"2026-08-01T01:40:29","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T01:40:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dextora.agency\/insights\/business-hosting-what-to-choose-where-not-to-save\/"},"modified":"2026-08-01T08:36:47","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T08:36:47","slug":"business-hosting-what-to-choose-where-not-to-save","status":"publish","type":"insight","link":"https:\/\/dextora.agency\/en\/insights\/business-hosting-what-to-choose-where-not-to-save\/","title":{"rendered":"Hosting for Business: What to Choose and Where Not to Cut Corners"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hosting is chosen once and usually on price. The logic is understandable: the site works, so why pay more. The problem is that the difference between cheap and adequate hosting does not show up day to day. It shows up at the worst possible moment, when the site goes down mid-campaign or when a backup is finally needed.<\/p>\n<h2>Types of hosting in plain terms<\/h2>\n<table>\n<thead>\n<tr>\n<th>Type<\/th>\n<th>What it is<\/th>\n<th>Who it suits<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td>Shared<\/td>\n<td>Hundreds of sites on one server, resources pooled<\/td>\n<td>Business card sites, blogs, low traffic<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Virtual private server<\/td>\n<td>A guaranteed share of resources, full control<\/td>\n<td>Corporate sites, stores<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Managed<\/td>\n<td>Server plus administration, updates, backups<\/td>\n<td>Companies with no technical staff<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Dedicated server<\/td>\n<td>The whole machine is yours<\/td>\n<td>High load, special requirements<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>For most companies the right answer is managed hosting. It costs two or three times more than shared, but removes an entire class of tasks that would otherwise need a person on staff.<\/p>\n<h2>What actually affects speed<\/h2>\n<p>A plan labelled &#8220;unlimited&#8221; tells you nothing about performance. Look at other things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/dextora.agency\/en\/insights\/core-web-vitals-speed-competitive-advantage\/\">Server response time<\/a>.<\/strong> The headline metric. Under 200 milliseconds is good; over 600 slows everything else down no matter how well you optimise images.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Disk type.<\/strong> SSD or NVMe. Spinning disks introduce latency on dynamic sites that caching cannot cure.<\/li>\n<li><strong>PHP and database versions.<\/strong> The gap between an old and a current version can be twofold on a real site.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Server location.<\/strong> If your audience is in Europe, a server in North America adds latency to every request.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Process limits.<\/strong> On cheap plans the site goes to sleep when there are no visitors and then takes a long time to wake.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>What you must not economise on<\/h2>\n<h3>Backups<\/h3>\n<p>The most important item and the one most often done for form only. A working setup: daily, retained at least a week, stored off the main server, with a restore tested at least once. A backup on the same disk protects against neither a compromise nor a hardware failure.<\/p>\n<h3>Isolation<\/h3>\n<p>On shared hosting your neighbour&#8217;s problems become yours: someone else&#8217;s site under load slows everyone down, and a compromised neighbour can sometimes open a path further. A separate account costs little and removes an entire risk scenario.<\/p>\n<h3>Support<\/h3>\n<p>Test it before buying: send support a question and see how long the reply takes. The difference between fifteen minutes and two days becomes critical exactly once, and is remembered forever.<\/p>\n<h3>Certificates and email<\/h3>\n<p>The certificate should renew automatically. Email is better kept separate from site hosting: if the site goes down or the domain lands on spam lists because of neighbours, your correspondence should keep working.<\/p>\n<h2>The domain, which everyone forgets<\/h2>\n<p>The domain is the only truly irreplaceable asset. A site can be rebuilt and hosting can be changed, but a domain with accumulated history cannot.<\/p>\n<p>Three rules:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Register the domain to the company, not the contractor.<\/strong> This is the most common problem when changing suppliers. Check right now whose name yours is in.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Enable auto-renewal and transfer lock.<\/strong> A lapsed domain renewal is a genuine business-loss scenario.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Keep domain and hosting in different places.<\/strong> That way a dispute with one provider does not block everything at once.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Signs it is time to move<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>The site is intermittently unavailable and support replies &#8220;please try again&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>Server response time is consistently above half a second.<\/li>\n<li>There is no way to install a current PHP version.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/dextora.agency\/en\/insights\/cybersecurity-for-small-business-baseline-protection-guide\/\">Backups<\/a> are made but nobody has ever attempted a restore.<\/li>\n<li>The control panel does not let you view logs.<\/li>\n<li>You hit plan limits every month.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>How to migrate without losses<\/h2>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>Lower the DNS record lifetime<\/strong> a day before the move. The switch then takes minutes rather than two days.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Deploy a copy on the new server<\/strong> and test it via a direct address without switching the domain.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Test email separately.<\/strong> This is the most common breakage during a move: the site works, form emails never arrive.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Switch during your quietest traffic period<\/strong> and not on a Friday.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Keep the old hosting for a week.<\/strong> While records propagate, some visitors still land there.<\/li>\n<li><strong>After switching, verify<\/strong> the certificate, the forms, and redirects between www and non-www.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<h2>What it costs over time<\/h2>\n<p>For a typical corporate site, the difference between cheap and adequate hosting is comparable to one hour of developer time per month. A single incident involving data loss or a day of downtime costs more than a year of that difference.<\/p>\n<p>Hosting is not an expense on a server. It is insurance against scenarios that each occur rarely but cost disproportionately much. Economising here works right up until something happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Four hosting types and who each suits, what genuinely affects site speed, why backups and isolation matter more than the plan price, the rules of domain ownership and how to migrate without losses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":8052,"template":"","insight_category":[154],"insight_tag":[178,186,162],"class_list":["post-8056","insight","type-insight","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","insight_category-guides","insight_tag-performance","insight_tag-security","insight_tag-web-development"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dextora.agency\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insight\/8056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dextora.agency\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insight"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dextora.agency\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/insight"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dextora.agency\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dextora.agency\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dextora.agency\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"insight_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dextora.agency\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insight_category?post=8056"},{"taxonomy":"insight_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dextora.agency\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/insight_tag?post=8056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}