How to choose hosting. What actually matters
Renewal price, backups, site isolation, support response time. The hosting selection criteria that really matter. Without the marketing noise.
Hosting comparison sites focus on disk capacity and the number of databases. That is like choosing a car by boot size. Below you will find the criteria that actually affect how your site runs and how comfortable you are as a customer.
The renewal price, not the introductory price
The biggest trap in Polish hosting: first year for PLN 49, renewal for PLN 299. It is a deliberate strategy: lure them in with a low price, make money on renewals. Hosts are betting that a customer will not want to migrate after a year.
Before you buy, find the renewal price. Not on the home page (it will not be there) — in the terms or in the price list after you log in. If it is 3-5x higher than the promotional price, you know what the "deal" is.
Sanity-check question: "How much will I pay for the second year?". If the answer is evasive or points you to the terms, you have your answer.
Backups. Who runs them and what do they cost
Many hosts offer backups as a paid add-on (PLN 20-50/month). Others do take backups, but:
- They do not give you access to them (you have to ask support)
- Restoring takes hours
- The backups are stored on the same server (a server failure wipes the backup with the site)
What to look for:
- Backups included in the plan (not an add-on)
- Frequency: at least daily
- Retention: how many days back you can restore
- Off-site: copies kept off the production server
- Access: ability to restore yourself from the panel
Support response time
"24/7 support" can mean a chatbot replying with template messages. The questions that matter more:
- What is the guaranteed response time? Not "answer", but "response" — confirmation that someone is working on the problem.
- Are you talking to a human? Can support actually log into the server and fix the problem, or does it just link to documentation?
- Which channels? Ticket, email, phone? A 48-hour ticket reply is not "support", it is a complaints box.
Site isolation
On cheap shared hosting, all sites belonging to one customer run under a single system account. If an attacker takes over one site (through a vulnerable plugin, say), they automatically gain access to the files of every other site on that account.
Hosting with isolation runs each site in a separate environment: separate processes, separate permissions. Infection on one site does not affect the rest.
This is critical if on one host you have:
- A company site plus a blog
- Several client sites
- A shop plus a landing page
Server location
If your customers are in the UK or continental Europe:
- A server in the EU: 5-20 ms latency
- A server in the US: 100-150 ms latency
- A server in Asia: 200-300 ms latency
Every additional 100 ms of latency is a measurable drop in conversion. EU servers also make GDPR compliance easier.
Migration. Who does it
Migrating a site is an operation where it is easy to break something:
- Damaged files
- A broken database (encoding, collation)
- DNS issues (the site is down for hours)
- Mail loss when migrating mailboxes
A good host offers free migration handled by their team. You provide access to the old host; they move the files, databases, mail content, DNS, SSL and cron jobs. If a host tells you to migrate yourself, they either lack the skill or do not really care about you as a customer.
What is NOT worth looking at
- "Unlimited disk space": it does not exist. The terms always include a limit (a fair-use policy, usually 10-50 GB in practice).
- "Unlimited transfer": same as above. Check the terms.
- Number of databases: most sites need one. "100 databases" is a marketing argument.
- Number of email accounts: only matters if you plan dozens of mailboxes.
- "99.9% uptime": literally every host promises this. Check independent measurements (UptimeRobot, StatusCake) instead of trusting the claim.
Summary
| Criterion | Important | Marketing noise |
|---|---|---|
| Renewal price | Yes | |
| Backups included + off-site | Yes | |
| Support response time | Yes | |
| Site isolation | Yes | |
| Server location (EU) | Yes | |
| Free migration | Yes | |
| "Unlimited disk space" | Yes | |
| "99.9% uptime" | Yes | |
| 100 databases | Yes | |
| Free domain | Yes |