The web tower · the atrium

Web hosting, site builders and domain names

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.

Almost everybody arriving here is doing one of two things: putting a first site online, or trying to escape something they set up years ago and now cannot leave. The floors are arranged to serve both, and the second is treated as seriously as the first, because it is the more painful of the two and it is where most of the money is quietly lost.

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 which product is best, it is how hard it is to leave. A site built inside a closed builder cannot usually be moved; a domain registered inside a bundle can be awkward to release; hosting paid three years in advance is only a bargain if you are still happy in year two. Every floor here answers the leaving question explicitly.

The second rule concerns price. This is one of the most commission-driven categories on the internet — the recommendation pages ranking above this one are frequently paid placements, and the introductory prices they quote are usually first-term prices that increase substantially on renewal. Where a floor mentions cost, it says which price it is and when it was read.

The cloud storage wing sits here because it is where the files end up: the backups of the site, the photographs, the documents that a business cannot lose. The questions there are about capacity, sharing, and what happens when you stop paying.

Three levels, and you are on the first. This atrium lists the floors; a floor covers one subject completely and holds the shorter guides underneath it. Nothing here is more than three clicks from the front door.

What this tower will not do

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 floor that omits that is not informing anybody.

It will not tell you to build on something you cannot leave without saying so first. Every building floor states 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 floors should be read 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.