A practical checklist for choosing hosting

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Run through this the next time choosing hosting comes up.

Performance work is mostly subtraction, which makes it unpopular and effective. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

The checklist

• Match the hosting to the site, not to the price alone
• Static sites need far less than most people buy
• Support quality matters most on the day something breaks
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

Why it matters

Match the hosting to the site, not to the price alone. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

In practice

Speed is a feature people notice only in its absence, and then they leave rather than complain. Three things worth confirming about choosing hosting before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Static sites need far less than most people buy — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.