Choosing hosting for small teams

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Most advice about choosing hosting assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Real-world numbers from actual visitors matter more than a score produced on a fast laptop. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What to keep

Match the hosting to the site, not to the price alone. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly.

The practical version

Support quality matters most on the day something breaks. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• 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

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