What to ask your agency about choosing hosting

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on choosing hosting, these questions are worth asking early.

Real-world numbers from actual visitors matter more than a score produced on a fast laptop. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Match the hosting to the site, not to the price alone. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Support quality matters most on the day something breaks. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

In practice

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
• Match the hosting to the site, not to the price alone — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.