Web hosting: the numbers that actually matter

Hosting is the most affiliate-saturated category on the consumer web. The commissions are large, recurring, and paid on signup, which is why almost every "best hosting" list you will find is a commission ranking wearing a review's clothes.

The advertised price is rarely the price. Most shared hosting is sold at a heavy first-term discount and renews at two to four times that rate, and the renewal figure is what you will actually pay for most of the time you use it. Find it before you buy; it is usually in the terms rather than on the pricing page.

Beyond price, four things separate hosts in practice and none of them appear in the marketing. Whether backups are included, taken daily, and restorable by you without a support ticket. Whether migration away is supported or obstructed. Whether support is staffed by people who can read a server log. And what the actual resource limits are, because "unlimited" always has a limit, described somewhere as fair use.

For anything beyond a personal site, uptime commitments matter less than what happens when they are missed. A guarantee that refunds a fraction of one month's fee is not insurance against a day offline.