Hosting and cloud, without the sales pitch

Hosting is the part of a website that owners understand least and pay for longest. It is also the easiest place for a vendor to sell something you do not need, because almost nobody asks for the reasoning behind the line item.

So here is the reasoning.

A website is one of three things, and only the third one is hard

Most business websites are brochures. Pages of text and images that change when you decide to change them. Nothing is calculated when a visitor arrives. A brochure site can be served as finished files, which means it can be made almost impossible to break and almost free to run.

Some are shops. Products, prices, stock, payments. Now something has to happen while the visitor waits: check the stock, take the money, send the confirmation. That needs a running program and a database.

A few are tools. Logins, dashboards, calculations, other people’s data. This is software that happens to be delivered through a browser, and it is the only one of the three where the hosting question is genuinely difficult.

Almost every quote you will receive prices all three the same way. That is the first thing worth noticing.

The only question that decides your hosting

Not “how much traffic will I get”. Everyone overestimates that, and modern hosting absorbs small-business traffic without noticing.

The question is: does anything have to be worked out while the visitor waits?

If the answer is no, you want your pages served as finished files from a network of servers close to your visitors. It is the fastest option, the cheapest option, and the one with the least to go wrong. There is no server to patch, so there is nothing to hack in the usual way.

If the answer is yes, you need a machine that stays awake, and then the follow-up questions start to matter: how much memory, which database, who applies the security updates, and what happens at 2am when it stops.

What “cloud” actually buys you

Cloud is not faster than a normal server. A badly built site on AWS is slow in exactly the same way it was slow on shared hosting, and it costs more.

What cloud buys is three specific things:

• Elasticity. You pay for what you use, and a sudden rush does not take the site down. This matters if your traffic is spiky, and not at all if it is steady.
• Managed pieces. Someone else runs the database, the backups, the certificate renewal. You are buying not having to think about it.
• Location. You can choose to serve from Mumbai instead of from Arizona. For an Indian audience this is worth more than most of the rest.

If none of those three describe your problem, cloud is a more expensive way to get the same website, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling.

The thing that actually makes sites slow

It is almost never the server.

In the work we do, the order is depressingly consistent: oversized images first, then too much JavaScript, then a slow origin, then distance. Owners spend money on the last two and ignore the first two, because the first two sound like the developer’s fault and the last two sound like something you can buy your way out of.

What we do about it

We host most of the sites we build as finished files behind a content network, in the Mumbai region where the audience is. The running cost is usually a rounding error, the sites load in well under two seconds on Indian mobile networks, and there is no server sitting there waiting to be compromised.

When a project genuinely needs a machine that stays awake, we say so, we explain which of the three things above you are buying, and you own the account at the end. Not us.

The notes below go into the specifics.