What Is Web Hosting? A Plain-English Guide for Small Businesses

The short answer

Web hosting is space on a computer that stays switched on all the time, connected to the internet, holding the files that make up your website. You rent that space by the month or the year. Without it, your website exists only on somebody’s laptop and nobody else can see it.

What you are actually renting

A web host runs computers called servers. A server is an ordinary computer in most respects, except it lives in a building with backup power and a very fast internet connection, and it never gets turned off.

Your website — the pages, the photos, the code — sits in a folder on one of those servers. When somebody types your address, their browser asks that server for the folder, and the server sends it back. That round trip is why a slow host makes a slow website.

You are renting three things at once: the storage, the computer’s time when a visitor arrives, and the bandwidth to send your pages out. Most small business sites use very little of any of them.

Shared, VPS, dedicated — what the words mean

Shared hosting puts your site on a server alongside other people’s sites, all drawing on the same resources. It is the cheapest and it is what the overwhelming majority of small business websites run on, perfectly well.

VPS gives you a guaranteed slice of a server. It costs more and matters when your site gets busy enough that other people’s traffic starts affecting yours.

Dedicated is a whole server to yourself. Almost no small business needs this, and anyone pushing it at you for a brochure site is selling, not advising.

If a salesperson cannot explain in one sentence why you need the expensive tier, you do not need the expensive tier.

Hosting is not the same as your domain

This trips up nearly everyone. Your domain is the address people type. Your hosting is the building that address points to. They are bought separately, they can be bought from different companies, and they renew on different dates.

You can move hosts and keep your domain. You can change your domain and keep your host. Knowing they are separate is what stops you being locked in later.

What HTTPS and the padlock are

HTTPS scrambles the connection between your visitor and the server, so what passes between them cannot be read in transit. It is what puts the padlock in the address bar.

It is no longer optional. Browsers actively warn people away from sites without it, and Google has used it as a ranking signal for years. Any host charging extra for a basic certificate in 2026 is behind the times — free ones have been standard for a decade.

The shop analogy

Your domain is the sign over the door and the address on the business card. Your hosting is the rented unit behind the door — the floor space, the electricity, the lock. You can move the shop to a better unit and keep the same phone number and sign. You can also rename the shop and stay in the same unit. They are two bills, for two different things.

What it costs

Hosting with us, monthly	$29 a month	Your site on our servers with HTTPS and your domain connected.
Hosting with us, yearly	$290 a year	The same thing paid once instead of twelve times.
A .com domain	$39 a year	Bought separately — see the domain guide.
Typical budget shared hosting	$3 – $15 a month	Cheap, and you do the work: setup, updates, and nobody to call.

Our prices come straight from our price list, so this page can’t drift out of date. Figures for other companies are typical ranges, not quotes.

Do you actually need it?

You need hosting if

You want a website that other people can visit.
You are moving away from a builder like Wix or Squarespace and taking your site with you.
Somebody built you a site and handed you the files.

You do not need it separately if

You are on one of our website care plans — hosting and HTTPS are already in it, and buying hosting as well means paying twice.
Your site is built on a platform that hosts it for you, like Wix, Squarespace or Shopify. You are already paying for hosting inside that subscription.

Mistakes worth avoiding

Paying for hosting twice

If your website is on a care plan with us, or on a platform like Wix, hosting is already included. Check before you buy a second lot.

Buying four years up front for the headline price

Budget hosts advertise a low monthly rate that only applies if you prepay for years. The renewal is often three or four times the introductory price. Look at what year two costs.

Letting someone else own your domain

If the person who built your site registered the domain in their own name, you do not control your own address. Ask whose name it is in. This matters far more than the hosting.

Questions

The ones people actually ask.

Do I need hosting if I have a website builder like Wix?

No. Platforms like Wix, Squarespace and Shopify include hosting in their subscription — that is a large part of what you are paying for. You only need separate hosting if you move off the platform.

Can I move my website to a different host later?

If you own the files, yes — that is the normal way of things, and your domain comes with you. If your site was built inside a platform like Wix, you generally cannot move it; it has to be rebuilt. That is the trade-off those platforms make.

What happens to my site if I stop paying for hosting?

It goes offline. The files usually sit there for a short grace period before being deleted, so a lapsed bill is recoverable for a while, but not forever. Your domain is separate and keeps running until its own renewal date.

Is expensive hosting faster?

Sometimes, but it is rarely the thing holding a small site back. An oversized page full of uncompressed photos is slow on any host. Fix the page first; the hosting tier is usually the last thing to change, not the first.

Do you host sites you did not build?

Often, yes. Tell us what it is built on and where it lives now and we will say whether we can take it on and what moving it would involve.

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