hosting
Hosting is the service that stores your website's files and hands them to visitors' browsers, and it is the part of a website most owners never see and most vendors quietly control.
Every website is a pile of files. Pages, images, styles, a bit of code. Hosting is wherever that pile lives, and the service that hands the files to a browser when someone types your address. That is the whole job.
For twenty years, hosting meant renting space on a server. A company somewhere runs a computer, you pay a monthly fee, your site sits on it next to other people’s sites, and you hope the company keeps the machine patched. Most small business sites still work this way. Most of the problems I get called in to fix started there.
The way I host is different. The site is built ahead of time as a static site and pushed to Cloudflare’s network, where it is copied to data centres all over the world and served from whichever one is nearest. There is no server to rent, no machine to patch, and no monthly hosting bill in the old sense.
Why it matters to you
Hosting is the part of a website that owners are least likely to understand and most likely to be held hostage by. I have seen a provider hold three related businesses’ sites on a server shared with the provider’s own website, with the domains in the provider’s account and the nameservers pointed at the provider. The owner could not move, could not see the bill breakdown, and had one site broken into through a plugin on that shared server.
Where your site is hosted decides three things: how fast it is, how safe it is, and who can switch it off. Rented shared hosting is slow because one machine serves everyone, exposed because that machine is reachable by every scanner on the internet, and fragile because someone else holds the keys.
How I set it up
I build the site, then deploy it to Cloudflare from a GitHub repository that records every change. The Cloudflare account belongs to the business. Your domain’s DNS is in your account, you hold super admin, and billing, if there is any, runs on your card at Cloudflare’s rate with no markup. I have access to do the work. I do not own anything.
When there is an old site to replace, I build the new one alongside it. The old one stays live until the new one is ready, then the domain is pointed at the new one. I keep the old site frozen as a backup for thirty days in case anything was missed, and then it is cancelled.
What it looks like in practice
You get a site that loads fast from anywhere, stays up, and does not need a hosting login you will forget. You get a Cloudflare dashboard with your domain in it, which you can ignore until the day you need it. You get one line in the arrangement for hosting, and it reads “runs and maintains it” on my side and “owns the account” on yours.
If you ever want to leave, you point the domain somewhere else and take the code with you. That is what hosting should feel like: a utility, not a hostage situation.
Questions I get about this
- What is the difference between hosting and my domain?
- The domain is your address. Hosting is the building at that address. You can move the building and keep the address, and you can keep the building and change the address. They are separate things and should be in separate places in your head, even when one company sells both.
- Do I need to buy a hosting plan?
- For the sites I build, no. The site runs on Cloudflare's network, in an account in your name, and the free tier covers most small businesses. Anything above that is billed by Cloudflare directly at their own rate.
- My old provider said the site cannot move without breaking. Is that true?
- Almost never. A site can be rebuilt on new hosting while the old one keeps running, then the domain is pointed at the new one. The old site is kept frozen as a backup for a while, and then switched off. Nobody notices the switch except you.
Want this set up properly for your business?
This is the kind of thing I build every week. Grab a time and we will talk through what fits.