Comparing hosting options?
This guide covers the real price tiers, what managed actually means, and when to upgrade.
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Last updated: August 2026
What "fast hosting" means in numbers
Ignore marketing adjectives and judge three metrics. Time to first byte (TTFB) under 400 ms is good, under 200 ms is excellent, over 600 ms means the server is your bottleneck. Consistency: fast at 3 a.m. and slow at 8 p.m. means you are sharing with busy neighbors. Behavior under load: does a traffic spike get absorbed or throttled into errors?
The honest price tiers
| Price | What you actually get |
|---|---|
| $2 to $8 | Shared slot, variable speed, ticket-queue support |
| $10 to $18 | Better shared or entry VPS, still self-managed |
| $20 to $35 | Managed VPS or managed WordPress: dedicated resources, real support |
| $40+ | More headroom than most business sites will ever use |
The sweet spot for a business website is $20 to $35. Below it you save $200 a year and pay it back in lost conversions; above it you are usually buying capacity you do not need.
How to get fast without overspending
Fix the site before buying a bigger server. Caching, image compression, a current PHP version and database cleanup routinely double a site's speed on the same hosting, and our speed guide covers the order. Only when TTFB stays high after those fixes is the server genuinely the problem.
Then choose hosting on the renewal price, not the intro price. A $2.99 plan renewing at $12.99 is a $12.99 plan with a marketing budget, and comparing intro rates is how people end up on the wrong tier.
Where cheap hosting actually costs you
Support depth, first. Budget hosts answer in hours or days, with knowledge-base links rather than diagnosis. Resource caps, second: throttling arrives exactly when a campaign works. Backups, third: often an upsell, often untested. And speed decay, fourth, as hosts pack more accounts onto the same hardware over time.
What we charge and why
Our managed VPS is $29 per month, or $19 when added to any maintenance plan. There is no cPanel, because our engineers administer the server and a control panel would be a license fee for decoration; you request changes in chat and they happen in minutes. Migration is free and zero-downtime. That price is possible for the same reason our maintenance is: a distributed senior team without downtown overhead. Details on the managed hosting page.
FAQ
Is free hosting ever acceptable for a business? No. Free hosting means ads, no support, no backups and no recourse, which is not a foundation for anything that earns money.
Will faster hosting improve my Google rankings? Indirectly and meaningfully: server speed feeds Core Web Vitals and visitor behavior, both of which affect rankings.
Can I switch hosts without downtime? Yes, with the copy-test-then-switch method described in our migration guide. Good hosts do it for you free.
How much hosting does a small business site need? Less than sales pages suggest. Two CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM handle the vast majority of business sites and stores when caching is configured properly.
Want hosting you never have to think about?
Managed VPS hosting at $29/mo, or $19 alongside any care plan. No cPanel to learn: you tell us what you need in chat and an engineer does it, usually within minutes. Free zero-downtime migration.