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What Website Hosting Actually Is (and Why Yours Can Be Free).

HOSTING · 4 MIN READ · WRITTEN FOR PEOPLE WHO OWN THEIR OWN SITE

Hosting is just the computer your website's files live on, connected to the internet so anyone can load your pages. That's the entire mystery. The industry wraps it in jargon because confusion sells $30-a-month packages to businesses that need none of it.

01 What a small business site actually needs

A site like the ones we build is a set of files: pages, images, styles. It doesn't need a rented server grinding away all day. Modern platforms (Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages and friends) serve files like these from fast, worldwide networks, and their free tiers comfortably cover a local business's traffic. Not "free trial" free. Actually free.

02 When paid hosting is legitimate

If that's not you, and for most trades it isn't, the $30/month "business hosting" plan is paying for the host's marketing, not your website.

03 Questions to ask anyone hosting your site

  1. "Can I have a copy of my site files?" The answer must be yes, today, no fee. It's your property.
  2. "What exactly does the monthly fee cover?" "Hosting" alone shouldn't cost much. Updates, changes, and management are worth paying for; raw file-serving mostly isn't.
  3. "If I leave, what happens?" The right answer: you take your files and your domain and go. Anything else is a hostage arrangement.
How we do it, for reference: Free & Clear clients get their site moved onto their own free hosting account, files handed over. The $75/mo plan isn't hosting rent, it's labor: updates, posts, reviews, fixes. The distinction matters, and now you know how to check anyone's version of it.

Q Is free hosting slower or less reliable?

The platforms we're talking about serve files from global networks that big companies use. For a static business site they're typically faster than cheap paid hosting.

Q What's the catch with free tiers?

Limits you're unlikely to hit: bandwidth caps in the hundreds of gigabytes, no server-side apps. A local business site uses a sliver of that.

Q Do I need cPanel/FTP/whatever my old host had?

For a static site, no. Those tools belong to an older way of hosting. Files go up through a simple deploy, and the platform handles the rest.

Rather have someone who does this every day handle it? That's the $75/mo plan. Or keep going solo, that's the whole point of these guides.

The straight answers Text Nick
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