Website development
A marketing site that explains what you do and brings in the request. Fixed scope, fixed price, a date.
Read more →Cheap hosting or managed hosting?
Hosting is the cheapest line on your whole site and the only one where saving money can cost you a day offline.
The short version
For an ordinary marketing site that takes no orders, cheap shared hosting is usually fine. Your site sits on a server with hundreds of others, and if something is occasionally slow, almost nobody notices. Three to ten euros a month, and that is a sensible spend.
It changes once the site earns money. A webshop offline for an hour during a campaign, or a site going slow exactly while your advertising runs, costs more than the annual subscription of the dearer option. Then you are not paying for servers but for somebody who answers when something breaks.
Cheap hosting is enough if
- The site informs and processes no transactions.
- An hour of downtime is annoying but costs nothing.
- Traffic is predictable and modest.
- Somebody is taking backups — check this, it is often not included.
Take managed hosting if
- Orders or enquiries come in through the site.
- You run campaigns that cause traffic peaks.
- Downtime costs revenue directly or loses customers.
- You process customer data and security has to be demonstrable.
- You do not want to restart a server yourself at three in the morning.
What gets overlooked here
Two things rarely appear in the comparison and determine almost everything. The first is backups: how often they are taken, how long they are kept, and — the question that counts — whether anybody has ever tested restoring one. A backup never restored is an assumption, not a provision.
The second is whose name the account is in. If the hosting is registered to your builder, you depend on their availability to reach your own site. Static sites like this one run on platforms where that is straightforward to arrange, and it belongs in your name either way.
Once you have decided
Rebuild or improve
A new site is almost never the answer to "we get too few enquiries". Finding out why first is cheaper and works more often.
Read more →WordPress vs custom
WordPress runs roughly four in ten websites. That is neither coincidence nor recommendation — it depends entirely on what the site has to do.
Read more →Freelancer or agency
The question that matters is not who builds it cheapest, but who is still there in two years when something has to change.
Read more →Frequently asked questions
Does hosting affect my Google ranking?
Indirectly, through speed. A slow server makes every page slower, and load time counts. A site on a fast host with a CDN has a structural advantage there.
What is a CDN and do I need one?
A network that serves your site from a server near the visitor. For a Dutch site with Dutch visitors the gain is small; if you serve other countries too, it is large.
Where does a static site run best?
On a platform that serves files with no database in between. That is faster, cheaper and practically unhackable, because there is no software running for anybody to attack.
Not sure which way to go?
Send a short brief with what you have now and what needs to be better. You get an honest answer, including if that answer is that you do not need us for it.