Almost nobody chooses their web hosting: they inherit it. Whoever built the site set it up, it is paid by direct debit and nobody looks at it again until the page will not open one Monday morning. This article is about that Monday and, above all, about everything that comes before it.
Domain, hosting, website and email are four different things
The domain is the name. Hosting is the place where the site lives, the computer that stays on all day serving your pages. The website is the files inside it. And email is yet another service that, in most cases, travels attached to the hosting without anyone ever deciding it should.
The four can sit on one invoice or in four different places, and both are normal. What is not normal is not knowing which is which, because that is exactly what lets you change one piece without breaking the other three. The keys that should always be in your name are in who owns your domain.
The one thing the server decides about your speed
Let us clear it first: if your site is slow, the server is almost never the problem. It is usually the weight of the photos and too many plugins, and we cover that in full in why your website is slow on mobile.
But there is one number that does belong to the server: the server response time, how long it takes from asking for a page to the first chunk arriving. Google developer documentation calls it TTFB. If that number is high on every page and at every hour, it is not your images: it is the machine. And that is the most honest sign that it is time to look at the hosting.
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Shared, VPS or managed: which one is yours
Shared
Your site shares a machine with many others. It is the cheapest option and for a corporate site that does not sell online it is usually enough. The risk has a neighbour name: if another site on the same machine goes wild, you feel it.
VPS
A reserved slice of a server, only yours. It performs better and it isolates you, but somebody has to run it: updates, security, backups. If that somebody does not exist, a VPS ends up being expensive shared hosting nobody looks after.
Managed
You pay for someone else to take care of all that. It is what makes sense for a business that does not want an in-house technician, and it is what we do.
There is a fourth route the brochures skip: if the site is static, built in HTML and CSS with no database behind it, the demands on the hosting drop enormously. Fewer parts, fewer things to update and fewer doors to come in through.
Backups: the question almost nobody asks
Every provider says they take backups. The good question is not «do you take backups?», it is «when did you last restore one?». A backup that has never been tested is just a large file.
Four things worth having in writing: how often it runs, how many days back are kept, where those copies live (if they are on the same machine as the site, they are not backups) and how long it takes to roll back. INCIBE, the Spanish cybersecurity institute, publishes guidance on backups for companies and it is half an hour well spent.
Where the server is, and why you should ask
For two reasons, and neither is over-technical. The first is distance: the further the machine is from your visitors, the longer every request travels. If your clients are in Girona and Barcelona, a server in Europe makes sense.
The second is the data. If your site collects anything from your clients, a contact form or a shop, that data is stored in a specific country, and once it leaves the European Union there are rules of their own that the Spanish data protection agency sets out on its site. We are not lawyers and every case has its own detail; what we do say is that the answer must exist and be in the contract, not in a support email.
Email is better off on its own
Nearly every cheap hosting plan throws in mailboxes, and that is where the trouble starts. The day the website brings the machine down, the email goes with it. And if another site on that server sends junk mail, the bad reputation of that internet address rubs off on you: your quotes start landing in the junk folder without you doing anything. Why it is worth separating them, and what it costs, is in business email with your own domain.
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Five signs you have outgrown it
- The site goes down now and then and nobody is surprised any more.
- The control panel will not let you upload a slightly large file, or cuts off halfway.
- It still takes just as long even after you slimmed down the photos.
- Support only answers through a form and takes two days.
- Every other month you are told you have exceeded the plan resources.
One out of five is no reason to rush. Three of them and your web hosting is already costing you money in a different way.
Switching hosting without going offline
It is done cold and with a safety net: everything is copied to the new machine, tested on a temporary address, the DNS refresh time is lowered, the record is pointed across and the old machine is left running for a few days just in case. Email goes separately and with more care, because that is where things really do get lost if it is done carelessly. The step by step, including the search side, is in migrate your website without losing rankings.
What hosting costs and what ours includes
On the market, decent shared hosting is a few euros a month and managed hosting goes up quite a bit. We do not sell it on its own: high-performance hosting is inside every plan. They are published on our pricing page, VAT on top and with no lock-in.
- Tu Landing, 100 € a month: one page, hosting and one mailbox.
- Tu Web, 200 € a month: up to ten pages, two mailboxes and one article a month.
- Presence plans, from 400 € a month: all of the above plus content, the Google listing and reviews, with 10, 15 or 25 mailboxes depending on the tier.
The three presence plans include migrating the website and the email accounts, which is exactly the part that stops most people from moving. And if you are better off staying where you are, we say so too: not everybody needs to move house.
Five questions before you sign
- How often are backups taken, where are they kept and how long does a restore take?
- Which country is the machine in?
- Is the certificate included and does it renew itself?
- Who do I call on a Saturday, and how fast do they answer?
- Can I take the site and the email with me whenever I want, and in what format?
If any answer is «the technical department looks at that», you already know how the day of a real problem is going to go.
How we run it
We are in Palamós and we host the sites we build and plenty we did not build. We set them up managed, with backups that get tested, a certificate that renews itself and support that answers the same day. If you want a second opinion on the hosting you have now, send us the domain and we will tell you what we see, with no commitment and without selling you a move you do not need.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.