Web hosting is the internet’s most underappreciated pillar. Everything you love about being online—podcasts, memes, articles, tweets, websites, online gaming, Netflix, and YouTube—lives on a server that an individual or company pays to keep up and running so that you can access it. In short, web hosting is the unseen foundation of the online experience.
Before building a website, you should be familiar with the basics of web hosting. Although it’s relatively easy to sign up and use a host’s website-building software to swiftly create an attractive, functional front end, there are many related terms and concepts to wrap your head around. Some of it is confusing, if not contradictory. But don’t fret; I’m here to walk you through what you need to know about web hosting before opening an account.
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1. There’s a Big Difference Between Hosting Types
If you’ve spent time on a web host’s website, you’ve probably seen terms like shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud, reseller, and WordPress. They represent the different web hosting types, but not every web host offers all of them. Plus, the hosting types differ significantly.
Nearly every web host offers shared hosting, the cheapest form of web hosting. With shared hosting, your website shares a server and server resources with many other sites. If you want to keep your web hosting budget small and don’t expect much traffic, shared hosting is the way to go. You should expect to pay $10 or less per month for this web hosting tier. Since you’re sharing resources with other sites, you should be prepared for occasional slowdowns when one of your site-mates attracts a lot of visitors. Free web hosting is available if you’re on a tight budget, but it has notable caveats (typically ads and extremely low server specs).
Larger businesses that expect big site traffic should pick VPS or dedicated hosting, each offering increasingly powerful server specs. VPS hosting is like a high-powered version of shared hosting, except that far fewer websites share a server’s resources, which are also more segregated. VPS hosting costs more than shared hosting, but you should pay less than $100 per month.
Dedicated hosting places your site on a server all by itself so it can leverage the server’s full power. This is the most expensive type of hosting; you may end up paying $100 or more per month for this raw power.
Reseller hosting lets you start a branded web hosting business without building the infrastructure from scratch. WordPress hosting lets you build a site in an environment optimized for the world’s most popular content management system. And cloud hosting? That’s an entirely different beast that lets you easily scale website power across multiple servers. Yet, the pricing for these hosting tiers is all over the place, so shopping around is vital.
2. You Can Save Money on Hosting With an Annual Plan
Web hosts generally offer lower rates for longer commitments. For example, a server plan could cost $10 per month on a rolling basis, but the price may drop to $8 per month if renewed annually. Granted, you’re expected to pay the entire bill up front, but the long-term savings may be substantial if you’re in the market for long-term web hosting.
(Credit: Shutterstock/Olivier Le Moal)
That said, be wary of introductory pricing. In the web hosting world, the sticker price is rarely what you’ll actually pay over the lifetime of your website. Most web hosts offer significantly lower rates for the first term, by design, to lock you into a contract. These rates can double or even triple when it’s time to renew. Also, note that these long-term discounted rates are not universal and largely depend on the web host. In fact, some providers occasionally charge more for multi-year plans than for shorter ones. This counterintuitive pricing makes it essential to click through to the final checkout or reference the company’s renewal rates details to see the actual math.
Pro tip: Never assume the price on the homepage is the price you’ll pay next year. Do your due diligence and check each provider’s renewal rates to verify pricing. Hosts often have a “Renewal Policy” link in the footer that provides a breakdown of the company’s non-promotional rates. When in doubt, don’t be afraid to contact customer service or chat for clarification.
3. ‘Bandwidth’ Isn’t the Same as ‘Data Transfers’
“Bandwidth” and “data transfer” are frequently used interchangeably to describe the amount of data your website serves to visitors, but technically, the terms do not have the same meaning.
(Credit: BlueHost)
Bandwidth is the total amount of data that can be transferred at any given time. In contrast, data transfer is the throughput or the actual amount of information that can be used over a given period of time—typically a month. Think of it like this: a web host may have a maximum of 5GB bandwidth, but depending on your hosting plan, your site may only allow 1GB of monthly data transfers.
If your website exceeds its allotted monthly data transfers due to a Reddit hit, for instance, a web host may slow your site’s data transfer speeds or charge you a penalty fee. It may even prompt you to upgrade to a higher web hosting tier. It’s good to know your site’s data limitations before you run into situations like this.
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4. ‘Unlimited’ Isn’t Quite Unlimited
Web hosts entice you to sign up for their hosting plans by offering unlimited storage or monthly data transfers. It’s generally not a completely honest deal. While often marketed as “unlimited,” storage is actually “unmetered,” meaning you are limited by file count (inodes) and the host’s respective fair usage policies. It’s just like the bottomless shrimp buffet: Eventually, a restaurant will cut you off if they don’t simply run out of shrimp first.
Unlimited storage and data transfers are typically associated with shared or WordPress plans, and they let you run wild…within limits. You’ll be in good standing if your blog gets a steady stream of reasonable traffic (whatever that may mean!). However, you shouldn’t expect to upload or stream 50TB of data per day. The average person is likely dabbling in some questionable activities with data usage that high, and the company will likely flag you for it.
You should consult a web host’s terms of service or a customer service representative to learn exactly what you can and cannot do within the scope of your plan’s unlimited offering. For example, DreamHost states on its website that the company doesn’t track “bandwidth or traffic, so you never have to worry about pesky overage fees.”
5. NVMe Is the Storage Format of Choice
In today’s hosting landscape, traditional HDDs have been largely phased out in favor of SSDs. Top-tier providers now use HDDs almost exclusively for “cold storage,” such as backups and massive video archives. The modern standard has shifted the debate from HDD versus SSD to SATA SSD versus NVMe SSD. While SATA SSDs are perfectly adequate for small, static blogs, they’re capped at speeds of roughly 550MB/s, making them the budget choice compared with the vastly superior NVMe standard. However, NVMe SSD drives typically carry a 15% to 40% price premium, depending on the web host.
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(Credit: Hostinger)
For professional and e-commerce sites, NVMe storage is the essential baseline. It offers speeds up to 7,000MB/s and dramatically lower latency than SATA SSDs, enabling NVMe SSDs to execute database queries faster than standard SSDs. This performance gap directly impacts your bottom line by reducing Time to First Byte (TTFB), a critical performance metric that measures the latency between a browser requesting a page and receiving the very first byte of content from the server. For reference, keep TTFB under 200ms (anything more than 1.5 seconds is considered poor). To ensure your site remains competitive and responsive, you should prioritize hosts that specifically list NVMe storage.
6. A Linux Server Will Do…Most of the Time
Nearly every web host uses Linux as the operating system powering their servers. In fact, I don’t think we’ve reviewed a web host that didn’t offer the free, open-source OS. Even if you aren’t familiar with Linux, you don’t need to do any special work on the back end to build a website. Website-building software makes creating sites a breeze.
That said, if your site needs the ASP or ASP.NET scripting frameworks, it needs the Windows Server operating system. That’s because the scripts you write and webpages you produce will only function in a Windows-based environment.
There’s an additional benefit: Microsoft apps, such as Office or Outlook, easily integrate with the server. The downside? Windows servers are incompatible with Linux-based, open-source software unless you do some tinkering. In addition, Windows servers cost approximately $10 to $20 more than their Linux equivalents, but if you need Microsoft’s tools, it’s a small premium. Our Linux vs. Windows guide breaks down everything you need to know about these operating systems.
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7. You Shouldn’t Compromise on Security
Security is a non-negotiable hosting element. To safeguard your site and visitors’ data, web hosting services have standardized on free, auto-renewing SSL certificates. Reputable web hosts typically include these via Let’s Encrypt, which provides the crucial “HTTPS” padlock and SEO compliance for blogs and small businesses.
Although most hosts offer free SSL data encryption, you must verify that these certificates are fully automated. Free SSL certificates expire every 90 days, and easily forgettable manual updates can pose a liability, leading to “Not Secure” browser warnings. It’s a silly thing to lose visitor trust over, so get ahead of the problem by ensuring that your host automates this.
Beyond encryption, comprehensive hosting protection requires proactive DDoS mitigation and malware management. “Always-on” DDoS protection is essential for absorbing malicious traffic spikes at the network fringe, before they can crash your server. You do not want to deal with DDoS mitigation once your website is already under attack: Successful DDoS consumes vast amounts of bandwidth and server resources, making it extremely difficult to apply fixes.
Similarly, look for hosts that go beyond simple malware scanning to offer automated cleanup. While basic hosts only alert you to an infection, premium hosts provide server-level scans and auto-removal tools that neutralize threats instantly, protecting both your data and your search engine rankings.
About Our Expert
Gabriel Zamora
Senior Writer, Software
Experience
In 2014, I began my career at PCMag as a freelancer. That blossomed into a full-time position in 2021, and I now review email marketing apps, mobile operating systems, web hosting services, streaming music platforms, and video games as a senior writer. I’m a graduate of Hunter College, a hard-core gamer, and an Apple enthusiast.
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