You built a website. Or someone built one for you. Either way, it’s out there on the internet and customers can find it. Job done, right?

Not quite. Your website needs a place to live, and where it lives matters more than most business owners realize. Hosting is the rent your website pays to exist on the internet — and just like renting office space, you can go cheap and deal with the consequences, or you can invest in something reliable.

Hosting in Plain English

When someone visits your website, their browser sends a request to a computer somewhere — a server — that stores your site’s files and sends them back. That server is your host.

Shared hosting (the $4/month plans from GoDaddy and similar companies) puts your website on a server with hundreds or even thousands of other websites. You’re all sharing the same resources — the same processing power, the same memory, the same bandwidth.

It’s like renting a desk in a warehouse with 500 other businesses. It’s cheap, but when the company next to you starts running heavy equipment, your lights flicker.

Why Cheap Hosting Costs You Money

That budget hosting plan seems like a great deal until you start counting what it actually costs you:

Slow load times. Shared servers get overloaded. When traffic spikes on any site sharing your server, everyone slows down. We’ve already covered why speed matters — every second of delay costs you visitors and search ranking.

Downtime. Cheap hosts have lower uptime guarantees. If your site goes down for two hours on a Tuesday afternoon, every potential customer who tried to find you during that window saw an error page and went to your competitor instead. You’ll never even know it happened.

Security vulnerabilities. On shared hosting, one compromised site on the server can potentially affect every other site on that server. Budget hosts are slower to patch security issues and less proactive about monitoring threats.

No real support. Call the support line at a budget host and you’ll wait on hold for 45 minutes to talk to someone reading from a script. If you have a real problem — your site got hacked, your email stopped working, your domain expired because auto-renew silently failed — you’re largely on your own.

The Alphabet Soup: SSL, DNS, CDN

A few terms you’ll encounter that are worth understanding:

SSL Certificate. This is what puts the padlock icon in your browser’s address bar and the “https” in your URL. It encrypts the connection between your visitor’s browser and your server, which means nobody can intercept the data in between. Every website needs one. Google penalizes sites without SSL, and most browsers now show scary “Not Secure” warnings to visitors on unencrypted sites. A legitimate hosting setup includes SSL at no extra charge.

DNS. The Domain Name System is essentially the internet’s phone book. It translates your domain name (yourbusiness.com) into the numeric address of your server. DNS misconfigurations are one of the most common reasons websites go down, and they can take hours to propagate fixes. Proper DNS management is part of good hosting.

CDN. A Content Delivery Network stores copies of your site on servers around the world so visitors load it from whichever server is closest to them. A visitor in Seattle gets your site from a server in Portland, not one in Virginia. This makes your site faster for everyone, everywhere.

What “Managed” Actually Means

When someone offers “managed hosting” or “managed website service,” they’re saying they handle the ongoing technical work that keeps a site healthy:

Updates and patches. Software needs updating. The server’s operating system, the web server software, SSL certificates — all of these need regular attention. Falling behind on updates is how sites get hacked.

Backups. If something goes wrong — a bad update, a hack, accidental deletion — you need a recent backup to restore from. Good managed hosting means automatic, regular backups that someone has actually tested restoring from.

Monitoring. Someone (or something) is watching your site around the clock. If it goes down at 2 AM, the problem gets addressed before your customers notice at 8 AM.

Security. Firewalls, malware scanning, DDoS protection, and proactive threat monitoring. The internet is a hostile place, and your website needs active defense.

Performance optimization. Caching, compression, image optimization, and server tuning to keep your site loading fast as content changes and traffic grows.

The Real Cost of “Free” Hosting

Some website builders advertise free hosting as part of their platform. There’s always a catch:

  • Your site lives on a subdomain (yourbusiness.wixsite.com) which looks unprofessional and hurts search rankings
  • You’re locked into their platform — migrating away means rebuilding from scratch
  • Performance is mediocre because you’re sharing resources with millions of other free-tier sites
  • Support is nonexistent unless you upgrade to a paid plan
  • They own the infrastructure, and if they change their terms or pricing, you have no leverage

Free hosting is fine for a personal blog or a hobby project. For a business that depends on its web presence, it’s a liability.

What Good Hosting Looks Like

A properly hosted business website should have:

  • 99.9% uptime or better — that’s less than nine hours of downtime per year
  • Automatic SSL — always on, always current, no extra charge
  • Daily backups — with the ability to restore quickly
  • Fast server response — under 200 milliseconds
  • Active security monitoring — not just a firewall, but someone paying attention
  • Someone to call — when something goes wrong, a real person who knows your site answers

The Firefly Software Difference

Our websites are hosted on production-grade infrastructure with SSL, CDN, automatic backups, and 24/7 monitoring included as standard. We don’t use shared hosting. We don’t use website builder platforms. Every site runs on its own isolated environment with resources dedicated to it.

When something needs updating, we handle it. When something goes wrong, we fix it. You don’t need to understand any of the technical details above — that’s our job.

Your job is running your business. Let us handle the rest.