People often choose web hosting on price. They regret it for other reasons: a site that slows down for no reason, support that answers three days later, or an account in the name of an agency that no longer returns your calls. Hosting is the foundation of the site. Like a house’s foundation, you don’t see it, but everything else rests on it.
The three families of web hosting
Shared hosting puts hundreds of sites on the same machine. It is the cheapest option, and it comes with the downsides of a shared apartment: when one neighbour throws a party, the whole building hears it. You share the processor, the memory and sometimes the reputation of the IP address. For a business site that receives requests or sells online, we avoid it.
Managed WordPress hosting (Kinsta or WP Engine, for example) hands the server over to the host. It takes care of system updates, backups and often a test copy of the site. Its support knows WordPress, and it often answers day and night. It costs more, and each plan has its limits on visits or storage, but you have nothing to manage on the server side.
A cloud server is a virtual server rented from a large provider (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, OVHcloud, for example). It offers the most power for the price, on one condition: someone has to set it up, update it and monitor it. On your own, that’s a project. With a provider, one question remains: who restarts the server if it stops responding at 3 a.m. on a Sunday? Some services, like Cloudways, manage that server for you, with support available around the clock for the server side.
Seven criteria for choosing web hosting
Whatever the family, here is what we check before recommending a host:
- The account and the invoice are in your name. If your provider disappears, you keep the keys to your own site.
- You know where the servers are. For speed, and for Law 25 (more on that below).
- The server offers a recent version of PHP, the language WordPress runs on, and you can change it yourself.
- Backups are stored off the server. A backup kept on the machine it protects disappears with it.
- A test copy of the site (staging) is possible, to try an update before it touches the real site.
- Support answers, and knows what it’s talking about. Read what is promised in writing, not the slogan.
- The renewal price is known. Many plans show a promotional price for the first term, then switch to the regular rate.
Speed, for its part, can be measured. The time the server takes to respond (TTFB, for Time to First Byte) depends directly on the hosting. Google advises aiming for 0.8 seconds or less. Our free speed test flags a server that is too slow to respond, for any page.
Where your data lives: the Law 25 question
Your site collects personal information as soon as it has a contact form. Quebec’s Law 25 regulates communicating that information outside Quebec: before doing so, the business must carry out a privacy impact assessment that considers, among other things, how sensitive the information is and the laws of the place it goes to (section 17 of the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector). The text says outside Quebec, not outside Canada: a server in Toronto counts.
A server in Quebec therefore makes things simpler. The major providers have them: Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud each have a region in Montreal, and OVHcloud runs a data centre in Beauharnois. It isn’t an obligation, and a server elsewhere can be the right choice. But that choice is made knowingly, with the assessment that goes with it.
Don’t know where your site is hosted today? Our hosting checker finds the host, the network and the servers behind a domain name in a few seconds. Behind a network like Cloudflare, it says so too, and then your hosting invoice settles the question.
Your email, somewhere other than your web host
Many hosting plans include mailboxes. We advise against using them for your business. The day the site is hacked, the server is overloaded or you change hosts, your email shouldn’t pay the price. A dedicated service like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 keeps your mailboxes safe from whatever happens to the site.
Emails sent by the site itself (form confirmations, orders, password resets) also do better going through a specialized sending service, with an SMTP plugin. We cover that in our list of essential WordPress plugins.
The domain name, a separate matter
The domain name (yourcompany.ca) isn’t the hosting. It is bought from a registrar, renewed every year or for several years, and it tells the world where your site is. Keeping it with a registrar separate from your host, in an account in your name with auto-renewal on, spares you two bad surprises: a domain that expired because a former employee’s credit card no longer went through, and a move blocked because the domain depends on the host you are leaving.
Our domain name checker shows a domain’s registrar, expiry date and name servers. A good starting point to find out who controls what.
Changing hosts without downtime
Some signs don’t lie: pages that take a long time to respond even when they are simple, repeated outages, a PHP version the host doesn’t update, support you can’t reach. At that point, moving costs less than staying.
A well-prepared move goes unnoticed by your visitors. The site is copied to the new server and tested at a temporary address. The time to live of the DNS records is lowered a few days before, so the switch propagates quickly. Then the domain points to the new server, the HTTPS certificate is issued, and the old hosting stays active for a few days, long enough to confirm nothing reaches it anymore. If your email stayed with the old host, this is where trouble starts: its records must be recreated exactly, or messages get lost during the transition. One more reason to have separated them.
How we work
We don’t resell hosting. We recommend a host suited to your site and your budget, then we set it up. We set up a cloud server when you also entrust us with the site’s maintenance. Otherwise, or if your site can’t wait until the next morning in case of an outage, we point you to managed hosting whose support answers day and night, like Kinsta, Cloudways or WP Engine. A small studio isn’t on call at 3 a.m., and we would rather tell you so. The account and the invoice stay in your name, like the domain name: you can change providers without moving your site.
Once the site is live, a server needs watching like everything else. Updates, off-server backups and continuous monitoring are part of our maintenance plans. And if your current site is slow, hosting is one of the first things we look at during a speed optimization.
