How to Choose Hosting for a Business Website

Hosting is the least glamorous decision in a web project, and the one that causes the most pain when chosen wrong. No affiliate links here — this is simply what we deploy for our own clients and why.

The three realistic options

Shared hosting (€3–10/month) — fine for a small brochure site with a few hundred visitors a month. You share a server with hundreds of other sites, which means your neighbors can slow you down. Acceptable starting point, poor long-term home.

VPS (€5–40/month) — your own virtual server. Fast, flexible, cheap for what you get. The catch: someone has to update it, secure it and fix it at 2 AM. If that someone is you, factor in your hourly rate.

Managed hosting (€25–100+/month) — a VPS where the provider handles updates, backups and security. This is where we put most client sites. Boring, reliable, and the support team actually answers.

What actually matters

• Server location. For a Norwegian audience, servers in Norway or nearby (Germany, Netherlands) shave noticeable milliseconds. For a global audience, use a CDN instead of chasing the "perfect" location.
• Backups you don't have to think about. Daily, automatic, and — critically — tested restores. Ask the provider when they last restored a backup, not just whether they take them.
• Support that answers. Send a pre-sales question at 8 PM. The speed and quality of the reply tells you more than any feature list.
• HTTPS and HTTP/2 out of the box. In 2026 this should be free and automatic. If a host charges extra for SSL, walk away.

Our rule of thumb

If your website makes you money, hosting should cost more than your coffee subscription and less than your phone bill. Everything below that range is false economy; everything above needs a reason.

And if you'd rather not think about any of this — that's literally what our support plans are for.