What's the difference between web hosting and a domain name?

Web hosting is the space, on a server, where your site's files live. The domain name is the address (mydomain.com) you type to reach it, and that points to that hosting. Two separate services, often bought separately, but always complementary to put a site online.

How much does web hosting cost?

It all depends on the type you pick. Shared hosting starts at a few dollars a month, while performant cloud or dedicated hosting climbs with your needs. For a serious WordPress site, expect somewhere between ten and a few tens of dollars a month. The real deciding factor is still the quality of the service.

Is free web hosting a thing, and is it a good idea?

Yes, free hosting exists, but I'd advise against it for a real project: limited performance, forced ads, weak security, and sometimes no uptime guarantee at all. To test or learn, why not. For a site you want to last and rank well, it's better to invest modestly.

Which type of hosting should a WordPress beginner choose?

To start out on WordPress, a beginner-friendly cloud host costs little and scales your performance along with your traffic. Shared hosting can be enough for a small brochure site on a tight budget, but it shows its limits fast. What matters most: a host with responsive support that actually has your back.

Does hosting include email addresses (@mydomain)?

Often yes, but not always. Many hosting plans include a few mailboxes on your domain name. Some people prefer to keep the two apart and hand their email to a dedicated service, which is more reliable for messaging. Always check exactly what a plan covers before you sign up.

What Is Web Hosting? A Simple Definition of the Web Host Behind Every Website

When you set out to publish your website, you quickly bump into the idea of web hosting. But what exactly is a web host? What does it actually do, and why is it unavoidable if you want your site online? Here’s a simple, accessible definition, even if you’re brand new to the web.

Understanding the idea of making a resource available on the Internet

Imagine you’re passionate about Vincent Van Gogh. You know the painter’s life and work down to the smallest detail, and, driven by the urge to share your passion with the rest of the world, you create a text file on your Internet-connected computer laying out everything you know. You then drop that file into a new folder that you make accessible to any Internet user who knows where to find it. Next, you send an email to your friends telling them where this folder lives on the Internet so that, wherever they are in the world, they can reach it. Six months later, one of your friends needs some information on Van Gogh and remembers the email you sent. They dig it out, locate your folder on the Internet, and find your text document, which they can read freely. Well done, you’ve just made a resource available on the web. In other words, you’ve turned your computer into your very own web hosting. And you yourself are the host of your resource.

So you can host your website yourself? Yes, but…

The example above is very concrete: you can turn your computer into the web hosting for a text file. And you could just as easily host an entire website, made up of a set of files tied to a database. But why does nobody actually do this? Because it runs into several problems:

What if your computer is switched off or breaks down? Your website instantly becomes unreachable.
If 3 people come to view your website, your computer will handle the load without a hitch. But what if 1,000 people show up at the same moment for some unexpected reason? At best, your pages will slow to a crawl. At worst, your computer shuts itself down to avoid damage, and your site becomes unreachable.
Your computer lets anyone freely browse one of your folders? That also goes for hackers, who in most cases won’t have any trouble breaking in and, why not, infecting your entire computer.

The role of a web host and how servers are managed

You’ve got it: the web host answers the problems from the previous section. That’s why it very quickly became a full-fledged profession that demands a great deal of expertise. A host must therefore have the skills to guarantee:

The best availability for your website. That means computers switched on around the clock and connected to the Internet so that anyone can reach the resources stored on them: these are the servers. The best hosts reach uptime rates of 99.99%, meaning your website will have been reachable 99.99% of the time.
The best performance so your pages load as fast as possible whatever the conditions. When you know this is one of the criteria for ranking on Google, it’s not a detail to overlook. Performance depends both on each server’s capacity and on how they’re configured to run alone or as a network. Of course, performance also depends on how well your site itself has been optimized, but the host has no control over that and must therefore optimize whatever can be optimized on its end.
The best security to prevent any hacking. Attacks on hosts’ servers are frequent and relentless: brute-force attacks, DDoS attacks, social engineering, and more. Here too, a website’s own security matters as much as the servers’, but the host is bound to guarantee maximum security across every service it offers.
A set of extra services that round out the three guarantees above, or bring you more convenience and features: domain name purchase, fast automatic WordPress installation, automatic plugin updates, mailbox management, automatic malware scanning, CDN included, and so on.

Today, website hosts are extremely numerous, and they offer different types of web hosting, each suited to different needs. For hosting WordPress sites, I recommend one that is particularly excellent in every respect. For other frameworks or CMSs, I recommend another that is equally excellent in its own field.

The best WordPress host: the perfect hosting offered by Faaaster

Faaaster is a WordPress host I find excellent and that has kept improving over the past few years. It offers a solution perfectly tailored to WordPress by leveraging the best of Google Cloud’s infrastructure, with data hosted in Europe (depending on your country). Their entry-level plan, more than enough for a classic WordPress site, is €9.60 excl. tax /month (or €96 excl. tax /year), which makes it a remarkably cost-effective offer with an unbeatable quality-to-price ratio. The service comes with features specifically suited to WordPress:

Availability: uses the excellent Google Cloud infrastructure, which guarantees 99.99% uptime.
Performance: Faaaster has rolled out numerous cache layers to improve the load time of your WordPress pages, even inside your admin area. Included in their plans, they also offer automatic compression and resizing of your images to cut down your pages’ weight. On top of that, the infrastructure Faaaster uses lets you monitor performance in real time.
Security: on top of giving every client premium protection through the Astra Security Pro service, which shields your site in several ways, Faaaster configures your WordPress so that as many weak points as possible are disabled by default.
Extra services included: full daily backups, restoring your site in case of a hack even if the error came from your own site, an alert system that warns you if anything happens on your site, and more, and their tech team will even take care of migrating your website over to them if you’re already hosted elsewhere!

You should also know that Faaaster has an ultra-responsive chat support (a reply within minutes), professional and genuinely friendly, whom you can ask any question about their whole service, the settings you need, your site’s performance, and so on. That quality of support is exactly what earned them a 4.9/5 rating on Trustpilot. In short, Faaaster has hosted and still hosts my main WordPress sites, including the very one you’re reading right now. Click the button below to discover everything Faaaster can do for you.

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The different types of web hosting

Among the different types of hosting that web hosts offer their clients, four are widely used, the last one being the gold standard: cloud hosting.

Shared hosting

Principle: the sites of many clients are hosted on a single server
Pros: inexpensive
Cons: performance and availability vary depending on the time of day, few settings available

For hosting a WordPress site: a good fit for a brochure site on a small budget.

Dedicated hosting (or dedicated server)

Principle: a server is exclusively dedicated to your website
Pros: all of the server’s performance is reserved for your site, everything is configurable
Cons: more expensive, requires professional network administration skills

For hosting a WordPress site: rarely recommended in the vast majority of cases.

Virtual hosting (or VPS, for Virtual Private Server)

Principle: several clients’ websites are hosted on the same server, but each site is isolated from the others while enjoying guaranteed resources
Pros: reliable performance, everything is configurable
Cons: cheaper than dedicated hosting but still on the pricey side, requires professional network administration skills

For hosting a WordPress site: rarely recommended in the vast majority of cases.

Cloud hosting

Principle: several clients’ websites are spread across a pool of virtual servers
Pros: affordable, lets you scale performance to your needs, plenty of configuration options, easy to get to grips with at some hosts, easy to back up
Cons: trickier to configure at some hosts

For hosting a WordPress site: a perfect fit with certain hosts, like the excellent Faaaster I recommend here.

The best hosting service for multiple websites running different CMSs and frameworks

When it comes to choosing a host for several websites running a variety of CMSs and frameworks, the cost can climb fast. Infomaniak stands out with its complete website hosting offer and handy services rarely found elsewhere, at pricing I find particularly accessible. Infomaniak also offers a whole range of services that go beyond basic hosting. Among them, you’ll find the ability to install different CMSs quickly and easily, such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, as well as support for popular frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, or Django. This versatility lets users efficiently manage several sites built on different technologies, all from a single platform. On top of that flexibility, Infomaniak offers advanced database management, automatic backup, and reinforced security tools. For example, its daily automatic backup service keeps your essential data protected, while its advanced security measures, including real-time threat detection, guard against cyberattacks. Infomaniak also sets itself apart with its commitment to performance and to the environment. With high-performance servers and a robust infrastructure, the platform ensures fast load times, which is essential for an optimal user experience, and makes maximum use of green energy. Finally, Infomaniak offers a professional email hosting service that I can only recommend. In fact, all my own mailboxes are hosted at Infomaniak. But the company also offers plenty of other services (a suite of collaborative work apps, guaranteed domain name renewal, and more), some of which are free (file sharing, sharing confidential data with your collaborators, and so on). Feel free to take a look at their site to see if one of their services might suit your needs.

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