Web · guides

Web hosting, site builders and domain names

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 9 September 2026 · 6 min read

This is the entrance to the web tower. Web hosting, the software that builds the site, the name it sits under, the certificate that makes the padlock appear, and the storage where everything else accumulates.

Two situations bring people here: putting a first site online, or trying to move something set up years ago. The tower is arranged to serve both, and the second is treated as seriously as the first — it is the one where a decision made once keeps costing.

There is a rule that shapes this entire tower, and it is worth having before you spend anything. What matters in this field is not only which product is best, it is how hard it is to leave. Hosting paid three years in advance is only a bargain if you are still happy in year two; a site and a domain can be easy or awkward to take elsewhere, and that varies by service. Every floor here will answer the leaving question explicitly, using what each service documents about it rather than a general rule.

The second rule concerns price, and it is a rule about reading rather than about the industry. Hosting is sold with affiliate commissions attached, so a recommendation may or may not be one; this tower does not carry them, and makes no claim about what is on anyone else’s. What it does instead is narrower and checkable: where a cost is mentioned, the guide says which price that is — introductory or renewal — and the date it was read. A price without those two things attached is not information you can act on, wherever it appears.

Cloud storage belongs to this subject because it is where the files end up: the backups of the site, the photographs, the documents that a business cannot lose. Nothing here covers it yet, and the questions it will answer are about capacity, sharing, and what happens when you stop paying.

Three levels are planned, and you are on the first. Seven guides exist so far — making a site mobile friendly, moving a domain, HTTP against HTTPS, the certificate chain, private DNS, the connection that is not private, and the site that cannot be reached — and they are linked below. The rest of the map is written out here as a plan: as each floor arrives it will cover one subject completely and hold the shorter guides underneath it, and nothing will be more than three clicks from the front door.

Not covered here. It will not publish a ranked list of hosts. Those lists are the most reliably paid content on the internet, the ranking usually reflects the commission, and producing an honest one requires running real sites on real accounts for months.

It will not quote a headline price without saying what it becomes. First-term pricing is the norm here and the renewal is frequently several times higher; a page that omits that is not informing anybody.

It will not tell you to build on something you cannot leave without saying so first. Every floor in the building wing will state plainly what happens to your site if you want to move it elsewhere.

And it will not carry affiliate links, which in this category means declining the single largest source of revenue available to a site like this one.

A last word about the order these subjects should be taken in, because getting it wrong is expensive. Choose how the site will be built before choosing where it will be hosted, and choose both before registering anything, because the building decision constrains the other two and not the other way round. A great many first sites are assembled in the opposite order — a domain bought on impulse, a hosting bundle bought alongside it, and then a builder chosen from whatever that bundle happens to include — and the result is a site living somewhere nobody chose, on terms nobody read, that is awkward to move for years afterwards. What holds instead is simple: every floor states what it costs to leave, and no floor here carries an affiliate link of any kind.