Imagine your website as a collection of documents: pages of text, images, maybe a contact form. Those documents have to live somewhere. When someone types your web address into their browser, their phone or computer goes and fetches those documents from wherever they are stored and displays them on screen.
Web hosting is simply the service of storing those documents on a computer that stays switched on and connected to the internet permanently, so that anyone can retrieve them at any time of the day or night. The company providing that service is called a hosting provider, and you pay them — monthly or annually — for the right to keep your files on their servers.
That is genuinely all there is to it. The word "server" sounds intimidating but it just means a computer that is designed to handle requests from the internet rather than sit on a desk.
Why Hosting Speed Matters More Than Most People Realise
Not all hosting is created equal. The most significant difference between a cheap hosting plan and a better one is usually speed: how quickly the server retrieves your files and delivers them to a visitor's browser.
This matters for two reasons. First, visitors leave slow websites. Research consistently shows that if a page takes more than two or three seconds to appear, a significant proportion of visitors press the back button before reading a single word. You can have the most beautifully designed site in the world and it will not help if it does not appear quickly.
Second, Google uses page speed as one of its ranking signals. A slow website is penalised in search results, which means fewer people find it, which means fewer enquiries. The quality of your hosting has a direct effect on your visibility in Google, even though most people never think about it in those terms.
The Different Types of Hosting
There are several types of hosting, and the terminology can be confusing. Three of them are genuinely relevant to a small business website, and each one works differently:
Shared hosting is the most common starting point. Your website shares a server with many other websites. It is inexpensive — typically £3 to £10 a month — and adequate for most small business sites. The limitation is that if another website on the same server gets a sudden surge of traffic, it can slow down your site too. For most local businesses that are not expecting thousands of visitors a day, this is rarely a problem in practice.
Platform hosting is what you get when you build your site on Wix, Squarespace, or a similar all-in-one tool. The hosting is bundled into your monthly subscription, so you do not have to think about it separately. The convenience is real; so are the ongoing fees and the fact that you cannot move your site to a different host without rebuilding it from scratch.
Static hosting is a newer approach that is becoming the standard for well-built small business websites. A static site is made up of simple, pre-built files — no complicated software running on the server, no database requests, no moving parts. Because static sites are simpler, they load extremely quickly and are less likely to be hacked. Services like GitHub Pages, Netlify, and Cloudflare Pages offer static hosting for free, or for very low cost. This is the approach GitFoundry uses for every site it builds.
Speed is not a feature you add to a website. It is the consequence of building carefully — and hosting is where that consequence begins, before a visitor has seen a single word of your content.
Free Hosting: Is It Any Good?
The honest answer is: it depends entirely on what the free hosting is for. Free hosting from a platform like Wix or WordPress.com comes with significant strings attached: your web address will include the platform's name (something like yourshop.wixsite.com rather than yourshop.co.uk), there will be adverts on your pages, and you will have limited control over how the site looks and functions. For a professional business, this is not a good starting point.
Free static hosting from a service like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages is a completely different matter. These services are genuinely free, used by millions of sites including large professional ones, and come with no adverts, no platform branding, and no meaningful restrictions. If your website is built as a static site, there is a reasonable case that you should not be paying for hosting at all.
The reason these services can offer free hosting is that static files are cheap to serve. There is no database to maintain, no software to update, no complex processing on every page load. The cost to the provider is minimal, and they absorb it in exchange for the traffic and goodwill.
What About Your Domain Name?
Hosting and domain names are two separate things, and they are easy to confuse. Your domain name is your web address — the part that ends in .co.uk or .com. You register a domain name through a domain registrar, typically for around £10 to £15 a year for a .co.uk address.
Hosting is where your files live. Your domain name is the address that points people to those files. You need both, and they can come from different companies. Many hosting providers also sell domain names, which can make it simpler to manage everything in one place — but it is worth knowing they are separate costs and separate services.
What a Small Business Website Actually Needs
For the vast majority of small business websites — a few pages describing your services, an about page, a contact form, perhaps a portfolio — the hosting requirements are modest. You do not need a dedicated server. You do not need enterprise-grade infrastructure. You need something fast, reliable, and reasonably priced.
If your site is built on a platform like Wix or Squarespace, the hosting is included in your monthly fee and you have no choice but to use theirs. If your site is custom-built as a static site, you have the option of free hosting on GitHub Pages or Cloudflare, which is what GitFoundry recommends and sets up for every client. If your site runs on WordPress, you will need a shared hosting plan from a provider like SiteGround or Krystal Hosting, budgeting around £5 to £10 a month for a reliable plan.
In any case, the hosting decision is largely a consequence of how your website is built. Getting the build right matters more than agonising over hosting plans. If you'd like to skip the monthly cost entirely, GitFoundry builds a website with no monthly fees — static HTML hosted free on GitHub Pages, with no subscription ever.