A response to Critical Issues in Choosing a Web Hosting Provider (March 2024)
In March 2024 I talked about choosing a hosting provider, and I built the whole argument on one distinction. A hosting plan is two different things bundled together: the server resources, and the people who support them.
“Core resources of computing power and internet access are cheap and become increasingly better and less expensive over time.”
And then the other half:
“What’s not cheap is technical expertise.”
I still think that is the most useful way to look at hosting. Cheap plans give you enough hardware but not much help when the site goes down. Expensive plans cost more mostly because of the engineers behind them, not the processors.
What still holds
Most of that advice holds up. Shared hosting is fine for many sites with steady traffic. A sudden spike can still knock a site offline on a shared plan. Hosting companies still look at their environment first and send you back to your developer if the problem is in the website itself. And it is still true that you get what you pay for when it comes to support.
I also said that if you had your own system administrator, you could run a powerful server on Amazon or Google for a fraction of the cost of a premium managed plan. The catch was the administrator. That expertise was expensive and hard to find.
What the agentic revolution changes
Two things have shifted.
The first is the website itself. A huge factor in how much server you need is how heavy the site is. In 2024 most of our sites ran on a page builder, plus its add-ons, plus a long list of plugins. All that code had to load and run on every request. When we rebuild a site on our AI-native theme, that weight comes off. A lean custom site asks much less of the server. It is faster on the same hardware and handles more traffic before it strains.
The second is the expertise. I said technical expertise was the expensive part of hosting. Agents don’t replace a skilled engineer’s judgment, but they do help experienced people work much faster: diagnosing a problem, reading logs, writing a fix, or tuning a configuration. And because we build the site ourselves in custom code, we know exactly what is running. When something goes wrong, there is no finger pointing between the host, the builder, and a plugin author.
One team for the site and the server
In 2024 I recommended a WordPress specialist host partly because they would look into site problems even when the problem wasn’t strictly theirs. That extra layer of support was worth a premium.
Today we take a simpler route. Hosting is included in our support plans. The same team that builds and maintains your site also takes care of where it runs. So when something breaks, there is one call to make. That is the gap I was trying to close in 2024 by picking the right host. Now we can close it by owning both sides. If a client prefers to host somewhere else, that is possible too.
We no longer have to choose between cheap hosting with no help and expensive hosting with an engineer on call. A lean site needs less server, and the support comes from the people who know the site best.
The bottom line, updated
I ended that video with this:
“The bottom line in website hosting is you really do get what you pay for.”
I still agree. Expertise still matters, and someone experienced still has to stand behind your site and the environment it runs in. What has changed is how much of the cost came from carrying weight the site never needed. Take that weight off, and good hosting with real support costs less than it used to.
¡Viva la Revolución!