Five mistakes teams make with choosing hosting

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit choosing hosting.

Real-world numbers from actual visitors matter more than a score produced on a fast laptop. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

What to watch for

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Match the hosting to the site, not to the price alone
• Static sites need far less than most people buy
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Support quality matters most on the day something breaks. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What to do next

The short version

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
• Support quality matters most on the day something breaks — 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.