Hosting Guides

What this section is

These are buying guides, not tutorials. They are written for people who need to make a hosting decision — a new site owner picking a registrar for the first time, a developer evaluating managed WordPress platforms for a client, a small business owner trying to work out whether Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 makes more sense for their team. Each guide covers the criteria that actually matter for that decision, calls out the trade-offs honestly, and ends with a clear recommendation by use-case. The providers named in the prose are the ones listed on the affiliate shelf below each page; a disclosure note on that arrangement appears at the bottom of this introduction.

The guides are deliberately opinionated. “It depends” is not useful when you are staring at a registrar’s checkout page. The goal is to give you a well-reasoned default and to make the exceptions obvious enough that you will recognise when you are in one.

Who these guides are for

Anyone setting up or migrating a website, whether that is a personal project, a small business, a WooCommerce shop, or a content site. You do not need technical experience — the guides are written to be useful from first purchase through to the infrastructure decisions that come up six months later when a site starts getting real traffic. Developers and agencies will find the vendor-comparison sections useful as a reference for conversations with clients who want a second opinion.

The 12 guides

Choosing Your Domain Name The mechanics of how domain names work, what makes a name registrable vs. unavailable, the real difference between TLDs (.com, .co.uk, .io, .au), and the naming decisions that are genuinely irreversible once a site goes live.

Domain Registrars Compared Namecheap, Crazy Domains, and Cloudflare side-by-side on price, renewal cost (where most registrars recover margin), control panel quality, privacy protection, and DNS tooling. Includes the specific scenarios where each is the better choice.

Choosing a Web Host For people who have a domain and need to pick a host: what managed WordPress hosting is, why it is not the same category as shared hosting, and how to think about the performance and support trade-offs at different price points.

Shared vs VPS vs Cloud vs Dedicated The four main infrastructure models explained in terms of what each actually delivers — resource isolation, scalability behaviour, management overhead, and realistic failure modes — rather than marketing definitions. Specific providers mapped to each tier.

Managed WordPress Hosting Kinsta, WP Engine, SiteGround, and Cloudways compared directly: server infrastructure, staging environments, automatic updates, support response quality, and the price tier where each becomes genuinely worth it. The guide also covers what “managed” actually means and where the management stops.

Static Site Hosting Netlify, Vercel, and Cloudflare Pages for sites built with static generators (Hugo, Astro, Next.js export, Jekyll). Covers the free tier limits, deploy pipelines, edge function support, and the practical differences between the three for projects at different scales.

E-commerce Hosting Hosting requirements that are specific to online shops: PCI compliance, server performance under flash-sale traffic spikes, WooCommerce resource demands, and why cheap shared hosting fails e-commerce sites in predictable ways. Kinsta, Cloudways, and SiteGround evaluated for shop use-cases.

Email Hosting Options Google Workspace versus Microsoft 365 for business email at your own domain. The decision is not really about email — it is about the productivity suite you are already committed to, the platforms your team actually uses, and the admin overhead you can absorb.

SSL Certificates Explained What SSL actually does, why every site needs it regardless of whether it handles payments, the difference between DV, OV, and EV certificates, and where to get one for free (Cloudflare, Let’s Encrypt via most hosts) versus when a paid certificate is worth buying.

CDN Basics and Setup What a CDN does in plain terms, the measurable improvement in Time to First Byte for sites serving international audiences, and how to set up Cloudflare in front of an existing host in under thirty minutes. Includes the limits of a CDN and the failure modes to know about.

Backups, Security, and Recovery The three categories of hosting disaster (data loss, site compromise, accidental deletion), the backup approaches that actually protect against each, and the specific backup features offered by Kinsta, Cloudways, and SiteGround that are worth paying for versus the ones you should implement yourself regardless of host.

Site Migration and Cost Moving an existing site to a new host: the migration workflow for WordPress, the real cost of downtime during DNS propagation, when to pay for a managed migration versus doing it yourself, and the total-cost-of-ownership calculation that makes switching worth doing — or not.

On affiliate links

Some of the provider links on these pages are affiliate links: when you click through and sign up, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. This is how the site is funded. We only list providers we have evaluated directly; the affiliate arrangement does not influence which providers are recommended or what trade-offs are noted. Pricing is accurate at time of writing and is subject to change — always verify with the provider before signing up.