by Lisa Norman

So, you’re going to have an author website! Great! You’ll want a couple things:

• a domain name — the address people type in to get to your website. It’s usually your own name if you can get it, or you might need to buy one, although you can use a free one from some platforms;
• and hosting—a home where your website will live.

Those are the basics. Domain names are pretty familiar to anyone who has spent any time online. But hosting — that’s probably the least understood expense, and often the largest! It's the one I get the most questions about. The company you choose to host your website can affect your budget and how well your website works.

Note: if you use a hosted platform like Substack, Shopify, or even World Anvil, you're leaving the management of the server to them. Essentially, they become your hosting company, and they maintain your connection to the internet.

Disclaimer: I'm writing this post because clients ask about this all the time. I have strong opinions about which hosting companies I recommend to my clients because I have to support those sites in the future. My "short-list" of recommended hosting companies changes often. I'm too old to waste time fighting with bad hosting. I tried to find a good review site to include in this post, but none of them felt reliable, especially long term. Hosting companies often spend more money on advertising than on their machines or their tech support people. Word of mouth is often more reliable than review lists, so asking friends who are happy with their website is not a bad idea.

What does a website hosting company do?

Website hosting provides the computer (called a server) that your website lives on. This computer should stay connected to the internet at all times. And since anything connected to the internet is constantly attacked by killer robots, it needs to be secure. The domain name you use points at this computer.

The problem with hosting is that it can be hard to know if a company is good or not! You pay a lot of money, and if you have a good host, they are invisible. You aren’t calling them once a month about problems, because the problems don’t exist. But not all hosting companies are equal. And many of the biggest names spend more money on advertising than on making sure they provide a good product. Here are some things you need to consider.

A good web host will do more than just stay connected to the internet. (A bad one may not even do that well.) It should protect your website, connect you to services like email and SSL (an encryption method that makes websites safer to use), and have the software necessary to run your website.

If you just have a plain hand-coded site (yes, they still exist), you may not need much software on your server. But if you use a modern content management system like WordPress, you need a server that can handle geeky website programming languages like PHP and MySQL. These languages need to be updated regularly or they'll become targets for hackers.

Yes, I know these are things you don’t care about—but I guarantee: if you don’t have them, you’ll care!

Are there hosting companies that don’t have these basics? YES! There are also companies that charge extra for these services. You need to know what you’ll be paying for—and how much.

Basic services that aren’t always available:

• Quality technical support: This is one area where I see huge differences in hosts.
• High-speed servers: Every hosting company says they are fast. That doesn’t mean any more than a politician telling you they’re honest. Some companies’ servers are just faster than others. And visitors will leave if a site loads slowly.
• Updated PHP and MySQL: These are annoyingly important and surprisingly not always there on some budget hosting plans. I’ve even seen hosts promoting that they have WordPress-quality hosting that don’t meet the minimum requirements for WordPress.

How to compare prices

When you look at the cost of a hosting plan, you want to look at a few different things:

• Does the plan include free email? If it doesn’t, you will pay extra for your custom email address (like Jane@JaneDoe.com). A charge of $5/month is not uncommon if you have to buy it as an add-on.
• Does the plan include access to free SSL? If not, you’ll pay extra for it. I’ve seen charges for SSL cost $50-$150/year.
• Look at the storage space. Websites are tiny things. But if you decide you want to store a lot of high resolution images (don’t) or video (don’t do that either) on your hosting system, you’ll be paying extra for that.
• Hosting company reputation—this one can be harder to verify, but a host with a poor reputation can affect whether your email gets to your readers' inboxes or how well your site shows up on search engines

Ways to save money on hosting

• The first year on any hosting company is usually cheaper. Websites move.
• Buy a good plan that supports multiple websites and share with friends.
• Ask the hosting company if they offer longevity discounts. Mine gives me 20% off for 2 years and 30% off for 3 years, but only if I ask. Not all do, but some will.

I’ve been a web developer since the web was new. Here are some horror stories I’ve seen:

• A hosting company lied to one of my clients and said that a service was unnecessary and that they’d never provided it. Problem: I’d used that service on that hosting company for about 10 years. The technician didn’t know how to set it up, so he lied. We changed hosting companies and her site worked fine. The service was automatic on her new host.
• A hosting company that boasted WordPress hosting where the “edit post” screen wouldn’t load all the way. You couldn’t post a blog post. It’d run WordPress… but you couldn’t edit more than a page every few hours or it overloaded the server.
• Hosting servers with internal viruses that allow evil actors to hack websites from within.
• Automated backups that never ran. They said they did… right up until you needed to restore one. Then the company said that it was on the marketing material, but shouldn’t be something you relied on.
• A client’s website got hacked. When he tried to contact support, he was in the hold queue for 8 hours before being disconnected. (This was a well-publicized internal hosting company hacking that affected hundreds of thousands of websites. No, calling tech support should NOT have been his first recourse, but… well, he called me second.)
• A client switched to a cheaper hosting company and his website started crashing about once a month. It’d come back up, but he’d just have to wait until the server restarted.
• Hosting companies that don’t monitor their reputation, and then their email addresses get flagged as spam. (Note: if you don’t set up your email correctly, it will also get stuck in spam filters, but I’m talking about a host that actively allowed known spammers to have accounts on their servers. Anything coming out of those servers looked like spam. This is more common with budget hosting and is one reason good hosting often costs more.)
• A beautiful website on a bargain hosting company that wasn’t being indexed by search engines because the host was of a low reputation. We moved it to a better host and the site’s discoverability improved right away.

It may not be your website software

Pain points I’ve seen authors have due to hosting:

• Slow website
• Inability to update a site
• Emails not being delivered
• Headaches because their website keeps doing weird things

When I meet people who’ve had bad experiences with websites, much of the time it isn’t actually the website software that caused the problem. But because web-hosting servers are such geeky things, it can be hard for a normal person to realize that the problem isn’t their website but their host! And sometimes technical support representatives lie.

One of my favorite stories was an author who had landed a big promo deal. He was going to be on national television on Monday. His PR person contacted me on Friday to do a review of his website and get it ready for the event. As I was looking over the site and making sure it was ready, I asked about the hosting plan. Could it handle the sudden spike in traffic?

“No problem. I have it on a computer in my friend’s basement. He’s a geek, and says it’ll be fine.”

I flagged this as a concern, but with 2 days before the event, we were too short on time to resolve it.

Five minutes into the interview, the site went down.

Have you ever thought about where your website lives?

* * * * * *

About Lisa

Lisa Norman's passion has been writing since she could hold a pencil. While that is a cliché, she is unique in that her first novel was written on gum wrappers. As a young woman, she learned to program and discovered she has a talent for helping people and computers learn to work together and play nice. When she's not playing with her daughter, writing, or designing for the web, she can be found wandering the local beaches.

Lisa writes as Deleyna Marr and is the owner of Deleyna's Dynamic Designs, a web development company focused on helping writers, and Heart Ally Books, LLC, an indie publishing firm.

Interested in learning more from Lisa? Sign up for her newsletter or check out her classroom where she teaches social media, organization, technical skills, and marketing for authors!

Top image from Depositphotos.