Hosting is the space on a server where your website lives, so visitors can reach it day and night. You rent that space monthly or yearly. For an ordinary business site that costs roughly €5 to €50 per month, depending on speed, backups and support. Hosting is separate from your domain name: you can switch hosting providers without losing your address.
Your website consists of files: text, images and code. Those files have to sit on a computer that is always on and connected to the internet. Such a computer is called a server, and the space you rent on it is called hosting.
Without hosting your website is a folder on your own laptop that nobody can view. The hosting provider makes sure the files are always reachable, including at three in the morning and when a hundred people look at once.
| Type | Cost per month | Suitable for |
|---|---|---|
| Shared hosting | €3 to €10 | Small sites, few visitors |
| VPS | €10 to €60 | Business sites, webshops, own settings |
| Managed hosting | €30 to €150 | Anyone who does not want to touch the technology |
| Dedicated server | €80 and up | Heavy applications, high traffic |
With shared hosting your site sits alongside dozens of others on one server. That is cheap, but when a neighbour gets a traffic spike your site slows down. For a site that has to bring in customers, that is a poor place to economise.
Hosting is simply where your site lives, and that location partly determines how fast it is.
Hosting determines part of your load time, but not all of it. A heavy, badly built site does not become fast by putting it on an expensive server. Conversely, a well-built site can perform excellently on modest hosting.
We build sites on Next.js, where pages are prepared in advance as ready-made files. The visitor then does not query a database but receives a page that already exists, producing load times under two seconds without expensive hosting.
Our hosting runs on Cloudflare and Hetzner, with servers in the EU, daily backups, monitoring and automatic certificate renewal. That costs from €49 per month and is cancellable. Prefer to host elsewhere, and we deliver the site so it runs anywhere. See also what a website costs.
For an ordinary business site you pay roughly €5 to €50 per month, depending on the type and what is included. Shared hosting starts around €3, but there your site sits with dozens of others on one machine, which becomes noticeable as soon as one of them gets a traffic spike. Our own hosting costs from €49 per month and covers the hosting itself, daily backups, monitoring of availability, security updates and automatic renewal of the SSL certificate. It is cancellable and the site remains yours, so you are not tied to anything.
Up to a point, but far less than is often assumed. Hosting determines how quickly the server responds, but most of the load time usually sits in the site itself: oversized images, too many scripts, and a system that queries a database on every visit. A badly built site does not become fast by moving it to an expensive server. We build pages that are prepared in advance as static files, so they load in under two seconds without expensive hosting being necessary.
Yes, and you will not lose your domain name in the process, provided it is registered in your company name. During a migration we prepare the site on the new server, test everything, and only then point the domain at the new location. Done carefully, visitors notice nothing and there is no moment when the site is offline. Watch one thing in particular: make sure you have access to your own domain name and that it is not registered to your previous builder, because that is the most common reason a migration stalls.
Choose a server in the Netherlands or Germany. The distance to the visitor determines part of the load time, and a server in the United States quickly adds hundreds of milliseconds for Dutch traffic. A server inside the EU is also simpler from a GDPR perspective, because personal data then stays within the European Economic Area. We use Hetzner in Germany combined with Cloudflare, which additionally keeps files closer to the visitor within its network.