Hosting is the least interesting part of owning a website and the part most likely to quietly cost you money or lose you a weekend. Here is what the words mean and what actually matters, in the order it matters.
Hosting, domain, and the difference
Your domain is the address. Your hosting is the building. They are separate purchases, often from separate companies, and confusing them is the single most common reason somebody cannot get their own website back.
Write down which company has which. Do it today. I have spent whole afternoons helping people find a domain registered in 2012 by a cousin who has since changed email addresses.
What you are actually buying
Shared hosting means your site sits on a machine with a few hundred others. For a small business site this is completely fine and costs between five and fifteen dollars a month.
Managed hosting means somebody handles the updates, backups and security patching for you. It costs more, between twenty five and sixty a month, and for most owners it is worth it, because the alternative is that nobody does those things at all.
A VPS or dedicated server is a machine you control. If you are reading this article you do not need one.
The four things worth checking
Backups, and specifically whether anybody has ever restored one. A backup nobody has tested is a hope. Ask your provider to restore your site to a staging copy once, and watch them do it.
Updates. WordPress and its plugins get security fixes constantly. A site nobody updates for a year is not a website, it is a slowly opening door.
Where the support is. Not the response time on the sales page. Ask what happens at nine on a Saturday night, and get the answer before you need it.
Whether you can leave. You should be able to download a full copy of your site and move it elsewhere in an afternoon. If that is difficult, that difficulty is deliberate.
What it should cost
For a four to eight page business site, somewhere between fifteen and forty dollars a month all in, including hosting, backups, updates and a domain renewal spread across the year.
Under ten a month usually means nobody is patching anything. Over eighty a month for a small site means you are paying for a plan sized for a shop that gets thirty thousand visits a week, and you are not that.
Two mistakes I see constantly
Prepaying four years to get the headline price. The discount is real and so is the fact that you have now bet four years on a company you have used for nine days.
Letting whoever built the site own the hosting account. It is convenient right up until the relationship ends, and then it is the reason people call me. Put the account in your name and your email, and give your developer access to it. Not the other way around.