How to actually choose a web hosting provider (without falling for the $1.99 trap)
The headline price isn't the price. Here's the checklist we use to evaluate hosting for our customers — and the questions to ask before you commit.
If you've ever tried to compare web-hosting providers by price alone, you know how quickly you end up confused. The $1.99/month becomes $14.99 on renewal, the "unlimited" plan throttles at 50,000 daily visitors, and the "free SSL" is bundled into a $9.95 add-on. Here's the evaluation checklist we actually use when we recommend hosting to customers.
What price means
- Headline vs. renewal. Always check the renewal price, not the introductory one. The gap is often 4–6×.
- Annual upfront vs. monthly. Cheap headline prices almost always require 36 months upfront.
- What's bundled. Email, SSL, daily backups, CDN, malware scanning, migration. Some hosts include all; some charge extra for every line item.
What "uptime" means
Marketing pages will say 99.9% or 99.99%. What actually matters is whether the host posts a status page with verifiable third-party monitoring, whether they credit you for downtime, and whether incidents get a postmortem.
What "support" means
Live chat at 3am is great. Live chat at 3am that escalates to a real engineer who can SSH into your server is rare. Test the support before you commit — open a pre-sales chat and ask a technical question. The quality of the answer is a strong signal.
The Linusite shortlist (categorised, not ranked)
- Cheap-and-cheerful for a starter site: Hostinger, Namecheap, Bluehost — fine as long as you understand the trade-offs.
- Premium managed WordPress: Kinsta, WP Engine, Pressable. You pay a real number, you get a real service.
- Cloud DIY: Cloudways, DigitalOcean App Platform, Linode managed. Best price-performance if you have an engineer.
- Hyperscalers: AWS, GCP, Azure. Only sensible if your stack is genuinely outgrowing PaaS.
- What we host customers on: our own multi-tenant Sitesox cluster. Same hardening, same monitoring, same humans on call as our own production stack.
The honest answer
There is no single "best" host. The right host is the one that bundles the things you'd otherwise forget to set up (backups, SSL, email, monitoring) and stays out of your way the rest of the time. If you want us to pick for you, we'll quote you a managed setup on the host that actually fits.