The SiteRoot team7 min read
Your website goes down on a Saturday morning. You ring the person who built it and they tell you it is a hosting problem, they will look at it Monday. You hang up and realise you have been paying for hosting for three years without ever knowing what it is.
So, plainly: hosting is renting space on a computer that is always on and always connected to the internet, with the files that make up your website on it. When somebody types your address, that computer hands them the page. No hosting, no page. For a small business site it typically runs about A$10 to A$30 a month, and it is very often bundled into something else you already pay for.
What you are paying for, in physical terms
Four things, and it helps to know which is which when a quote arrives.
Space. Your pages, your photos, your fonts. A five page site with real photographs on it is usually somewhere between 20 and 60 megabytes, which is nothing. Almost nobody outgrows the space on even the cheapest plan.
Traffic. Every visit sends a copy of the page down the line. This is where photo sizes bite: the same page can weigh 500 kilobytes or 5 megabytes depending entirely on whether the images were resized before they went up. The page nobody resized costs you ten times the traffic and loads slowly on a phone in a driveway.
A share of a machine. On a cheap plan your site sits on a computer with a lot of other sites. Usually fine. Occasionally one of those neighbours has a busy day and everyone slows down together.
Somebody keeping it patched. The software underneath a website gets security updates constantly. Who applies them is the real difference between eight dollars a month and forty, and it is the part never mentioned in the ad.
Shared, VPS and managed: what the words mean
You will see three shapes of plan.
- Shared hosting. Many sites on one machine. Roughly A$5 to A$20 a month. Right for almost every five page business site, and the fact that it is cheap is not a warning sign.
- A VPS, or virtual private server. Your own reserved slice of a machine. Roughly A$20 to A$100 a month. More control, and more responsibility: on most of these plans, keeping the software current becomes your problem.
- Managed hosting. Someone else does the updating, the backups and the watching. Usually from about A$25 or A$30 a month upwards.
If you are being quoted a VPS for a brochure site, ask why. It is not better, it is just bigger, and bigger comes with homework.
The padlock, and why it is the part that breaks
The padlock in the address bar comes from a certificate that proves the connection to your site is encrypted. Two facts about it are worth carrying around.
The first is that a basic certificate is free now and included by essentially every host. If anyone is charging you a yearly line item for a standard one, ask what it is for.
The second is the one that matters. Certificates expire, often every ninety days, and they have to renew. The renewal is normally automatic and normally invisible, right up until it fails. When it fails, a visitor does not see a small warning. They see a full page from their browser telling them the site may not be safe, before a single word you wrote. Almost nobody clicks through that. Nothing tells you it has happened either, because your own browser has your site cached and looks perfectly fine.
So the question to ask about any hosting arrangement is not whether there is a certificate. It is who notices when the renewal fails.
Does it matter if the computer is in Australia?
Less than people think, and not nothing.
The honest mechanism: distance costs time, and the time is measured in tens of milliseconds. For a five page site, that difference is swamped by whether your photos were resized and how much extra code the page loads. If your site feels slow, the images are the first suspect, not the country.
Where it can genuinely matter is if you handle personal information and have a reason to care where it is stored, which is a question for your obligations rather than for your load time. If that applies to you, ask the host directly which country the files sit in and get the answer in writing.
What a hosting quote usually does not include
This is where the surprises live. Assume none of the following is in the number unless somebody says it is.
- Your domain name. A separate purchase from a registrar, usually A$10 to A$30 a year.
- Email at your own domain. Often a separate plan again.
- Backups. Ask three questions: how often, how far back, and have you ever restored one. A backup nobody has tested is a folder, not a safety net.
- Software updates. See above. On the cheapest plans, yours.
- Anyone watching. Most hosts will tell you if the machine is down. Almost none will tell you your particular site is broken, which is a different thing and the thing you care about.
How to tell whether hosting is actually your problem
When a site misbehaves, most owners guess hosting and are often wrong. Four checks, in order.
- Is it down for everyone, or only you? Try it on mobile data with wifi off. If it loads there, the problem is your connection or your network at work.
- Do you see a browser warning rather than a missing page? That is the certificate, not the hosting.
- Does the address do nothing at all? Check whether the domain has lapsed. A lapsed domain looks exactly like dead hosting and is a completely different bill.
- Is it up but slow? Open it on a phone and watch what loads last. Nine times out of ten it is a photograph nobody resized.
What happens if you stop paying
Worth knowing before it happens, because it is not gentle. Most hosts suspend the site quickly after a failed payment, then delete the files after a grace period that is often measured in weeks. At that point the site is not turned off, it is gone, and if there is no backup you control then rebuilding is the only path.
If your site lives somewhere you are not sure about, download a copy this week and put it somewhere you own.
Where SiteRoot sits
Hosting is in our price, and that is deliberate rather than generous: hosting is the part most likely to be forgotten until it fails, so it should not be a separate thing you remember to renew.
A$16.50 a month including GST (A$15 plus GST) covers the hosting, the certificate and every one of its renewals, and the changes you make afterwards. We watch two specific things on your behalf and both of them are the failures owners find out about from customers: whether your site is still answering, and whether its certificate is close to expiring. If either goes wrong the alert comes to us.
Images on the sites we build are loaded as the visitor scrolls to them rather than all at once, which is the traffic point above, handled at build time instead of being your job.
The domain is not in the price. You buy that yourself, in your own name, for the A$10 to A$30 a year, because your address should belong to you.
14 days free, then A$16.50/month (A$15 + GST). Card asked for during your 14 days, one free trial per customer, cancel anytime.
The five minute check on what you have now
- Open your site on your phone, on mobile data. Does it load in a couple of seconds?
- Is there a padlock in the address bar?
- Do you know who renews the certificate, and who gets told if it lapses?
- Do you know where your backups are, and could you get one without asking anyone?
- Do you know what your hosting costs a year, and the date it renews?
If you cannot answer three of those, you do not have a hosting problem yet. You have one waiting.
