How to get choosing hosting right
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. The short answer to choosing hosting is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Real-world numbers from actual visitors matter more than a score produced on a fast laptop. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
Why it matters
Match the hosting to the site, not to the price alone. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Static sites need far less than most people buy
- Support quality matters most on the day something breaks
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Support quality matters most on the day something breaks. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
Turning this into a decision
The short version
Performance work is mostly subtraction, which makes it unpopular and effective. 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
None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.