Hosting terms, and what they are hiding

Pricing

Introductory rate

A discounted price for your first term only, almost always requiring the longest term paid up front.

The discount is real but the framing is not: "$1.99/mo" often means $71.64 charged today for 36 months. Compare the total you will pay, not the monthly figure — that is what the true-cost calculator does.

Money-back guarantee

A window in which you can cancel for a refund, typically 30 days.

Not the same as a trial. Refunds usually exclude domain registration fees, and some hosts refund only the hosting portion of a bundle. A "3-day trial" is not a refund window at all.

Overage

What you are charged for exceeding an included limit — visits, bandwidth, storage or email sends.

Managed WordPress hosts commonly bill per thousand visits above a plan cap. A plan that is cheap at your current traffic can stop being cheap at twice it, so check the overage rate before the headline.

Prepaid term

The number of months you must pay for in advance to get the advertised price.

A 36-month term at the headline rate and a 12-month term are different products at different prices. Where a host quotes one figure, it is nearly always the longest term.

Renewal price

What the plan costs once the introductory term ends — usually two to four times the advertised rate.

The single most important number in hosting and the one least often published. An advertised $2.99 that renews at $10.99 costs $396 over three years, not $108. Hosts are not obliged to state it on the pricing page, and most do not: it lives in the terms, a knowledge-base article, or only at checkout.

Limits, and the words that hide them

Entry processes

How many of your PHP scripts may run at the same moment on a shared server.

The real ceiling on concurrent visitors for a shared plan, and rarely advertised. Exceeding it returns server errors to visitors rather than slowing the site down, which is why a site can appear fine in a speed test and fail under real traffic.

Inode limit

A cap on the number of files and folders your account may contain, regardless of their size.

The limit "unlimited storage" is actually enforced by. A WordPress install with a few plugins can hold tens of thousands of files, so an inode cap can stop you long before a disk quota would.

Unlimited

Marketing for "no stated number", constrained instead by an acceptable-use policy.

Unlimited storage usually excludes backups, media libraries and email; unlimited bandwidth is bounded by CPU and I/O limits you will hit first. The honest question is not how much, but what happens when you exceed it — throttling, a warning, or a forced upgrade.

Performance

CDN

A content delivery network: copies of your static files served from locations near the visitor.

Helps most for images, CSS and JavaScript, and for visitors far from your server. It does not speed up a database query, so it will not fix a slow admin area or checkout.

LiteSpeed

A commercial web server, commonly bundled with its own caching plugin for WordPress.

Genuinely fast on shared hosting, largely because of the cache rather than the server. The comparison that matters is against a well-cached Apache or NGINX host, not against an uncached one.

NVMe

A faster class of solid-state storage than the SATA SSDs it replaced.

Real but rarely the bottleneck on a shared plan, where CPU limits and concurrency caps bite first. Useful as a sign a host has refreshed its hardware.

TTFB

Time to first byte: how long the server takes to start responding to a request.

A common benchmark because it is easy to measure, and a partial one because it ignores everything after the first byte. A fast TTFB on a cached homepage tells you little about a logged-in checkout page.

Uptime SLA

A contractual promise about availability, with compensation defined if it is missed.

A number in marketing is not an SLA. A real one states what counts as downtime, how it is measured, and what you get — usually a service credit, not a refund. "99.9%" permits about 43 minutes of downtime a month; "100%" always has exclusions.

Kinds of hosting

Managed WordPress

Hosting tuned for one application, with updates, caching and backups handled for you.

You are buying operational work, not raw speed — a well-cached shared plan is often as fast. Worth it when someone else handling updates and recovery is worth more than the price difference.

Reseller hosting

An account divided into separate hosting accounts you can sell or allocate to clients.

The resources are still shared, so overselling shows up as your clients' sites slowing down together.

Shared hosting

Many sites on one server, sharing its CPU, memory and I/O.

The right answer for most sites for longer than the industry suggests. The constraint is concurrency, not bandwidth: it runs out when many people arrive at once, not when the month's traffic adds up.

VPS

A virtual private server: a guaranteed slice of a physical machine, with root access.

Guaranteed resources and full control, in exchange for being responsible for updates, security and configuration. "Managed VPS" means the host does some of that — ask exactly which parts.

Control panels and admin

cPanel

The most widely used hosting control panel.

Its licensing costs rose sharply from 2019, which is why several hosts moved to their own panels. Familiarity is worth something, and so is being able to move to another cPanel host without relearning.

Free migration

The host moves an existing site over for you.

Check the count and the scope: "free migration" often means one site, cPanel-to-cPanel, and excludes email or anything needing a rebuild.

Let's Encrypt

A free certificate authority providing the TLS certificates most hosts install automatically.

Any host charging for a basic SSL certificate is charging for something free. Paid certificates buy warranties and organisation validation, which a normal site does not need.

Staging site

A copy of your site where changes can be tested before going live.

The feature that prevents an update breaking a live site. Check whether pushing back to production is one click and whether the database goes with it.

Something missing, or an explanation you would argue with? Tell us — being wrong in public is worse than being corrected.