How to choose a web host for a small site

How we checked what a host promises

Everything worth knowing before you pay a host is printed on the host’s own site, in three places: the pricing page, the plan cards and the terms. This guide puts those pages in the order that decides the bill, and uses the three hosts the reviews cover as the worked example.

The checks are ordered by what costs most to get wrong. The entry rate is the figure every host advertises and the least useful one by itself; the term it belongs to, the renewal printed beside it and the cancellation terms are what the second and third years turn on. A reader who checks only the first of those is pricing a month rather than buying a service.

This page is a reading of published material rather than a report from inside an account, and no plan was signed up for to write it. The rates, allowances, guarantees and cancellation terms come from the companies’ own pricing and legal pages, checked on the date given at the end.

Six checks before you pay

Step 1: Read the entry rung as a set of limits

Every ladder starts with the plan the host puts in its advertising, and that plan is drawn around the smallest site it expects to host. The numbers to lift off the plan card are the storage allowance, the number of websites and whether a mailbox is included or sold separately, because those are what a second site or a mailing list runs into first, and they are the usual reason a site moves up a rung before its term is out.

The same card also says which purchases the plan removes. A host that puts the domain and the certificate inside the first term has taken two items off the shopping list, and one that leaves them out has left them on it.

Step 2: Find the term the advertised rate belongs to

An entry rate is not a price, it is a price attached to a condition, and the condition is how long you commit for. One of the shared hosts we reviewed advertises its headline figure on the longest term it sells, paid once for the whole period; the other advertises on a single year. The same headline monthly number therefore describes two different contracts, and the figure worth writing down is what the host collects at checkout rather than the rate it advertises.

Step 3: Price the second year before the first

Both shared hosts print the renewal beside the entry rate, and it is worth reading as carefully as the figure that caught your eye. Multiply the renewal by the years you mean to keep the site, and that total is what the site costs; the entry rate is a first-year number. A low entry rate with a renewal several times higher is a first year being sold, which is a fine thing to buy once and worth knowing you are buying.

Step 4: Look at where the ladder ends

What sits above the top shared rung decides how a growing site leaves. One of the three has a hard edge there: past the top rung the company sells a cloud instance, and a site that outgrows shared hosting changes platform rather than plan size. On another, the cloud and VPS lines stay inside the same account, so the same login carries the site onward. Neither shape is better on its own; the point of the check is to know which one you are choosing before the site needs it.

Step 5: Decide what a support promise is worth to you

Every plan in this group is managed, so saying that support exists separates nothing. The detail that does is a time. One of the three publishes response targets by tier and credits part of the month’s fee when one is missed, with an agreement that stops at the support console rather than at the service itself. The two shared hosts staff their desks around the clock without putting a first-response figure beside the promise. Where an hour offline costs money, a published time is worth more than a lower rate. Where nothing depends on the site being up, it is a line to skip.

Step 6: Check how you leave before you arrive

Cancellation terms read like boilerplate and behave like clauses. Four things are worth finding: the refund window, whether it covers a renewal as well as a first term, what the guarantee excludes, and what happens to the files afterwards. The last of those catches people out, because a cancellation is a request to stop billing rather than to move a site: an account closed without a copy taken first is an account with nothing left in it, and a plan paid for a month ahead is usually not refunded for the part of it nobody used.

A domain that arrives free with the first year tends to be treated as a separate purchase when a refund is calculated, and one registered on its own carries a short window of its own. Ten minutes on the terms page before paying costs less than a week of support tickets afterwards.

What changes the answer

The six checks do not move, but which of them carries the decision does.

If the site has not launched yet

Storage and site counts are guesses when nothing is published, so the entry rung is usually the right first purchase and the check that matters most becomes Step 4: the site should be able to grow by changing plan inside the same account rather than by changing host. A rung bought with a long term is a bet on numbers you have not met yet.

If the site is already live

Once pages are being served, the questions move from what the plan includes to what happens when it fills up. Bandwidth allowances, how often backups are taken and how far back they can be restored decide whether a busy week is an incident or an invoice, and those three lines are usually the ones a growing site discovers it did not read.

Sources

Hostinger (hostinger.com), checked 16 September 2026: the web hosting pricing page for the plan ladder, the term each rate belongs to and the renewal printed beside it; the plan cards for what each rung carries; and the refund policy page for the window a guarantee runs for.

SiteGround (siteground.com), checked 16 September 2026: the WordPress hosting page for the plans and the term each one is sold on, and the terms of service for the uptime guarantee, the steps a cancellation takes and how long copies survive it.

Cloudways (cloudways.com), checked 16 September 2026: the pricing page for how usage is billed with no term attached, and the service level agreement for the support targets by tier and what follows a missed one.