What Is Web Hosting?

A website needs a server that answers at any hour. The server entry explains what that machine and that program are. Hosting is the service that provides it: the provider supplies the hardware and the connection and, depending on the plan, some or all of the administration.

The domain is the name, DNS translates it into the server's address, and hosting is where the website lives. They are three separate services, and changing one does not mean changing the others.

Plan names are commercial terms: each provider decides what goes into its shared hosting, its VPS or its managed WordPress. Cloud is the exception, with a reference definition published in September 2011 by NIST, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Hosting types differ on three questions: how many resources are shared, who manages the server and how capacity grows.

With shared hosting, many websites use the same server, with its processor, memory and disk. The provider manages it, and the customer only manages their website. More capacity means a different plan.

With a VPS (virtual private server), one physical server is split into several virtual machines, each with its own operating system and allocated resources. The hardware is shared, the system is not. Who manages it depends on the contract: on an unmanaged VPS, system updates and security are the customer's job. To grow, the machine is given more resources.

In the cloud, according to the NIST definition, the customer accesses over the network a shared pool of configurable resources that can be provisioned and released quickly with minimal management effort. One of its five characteristics sets it apart from a VPS above all: capacity grows or shrinks with demand, in some cases automatically. A plan called "cloud" does not have to meet all five. Who manages what depends on the service model: in infrastructure as a service (IaaS), NIST leaves the underlying cloud infrastructure to the provider and the operating system, storage and applications to the customer.

With managed WordPress, the provider also looks after parts of the application, such as updates, backups or caching; which parts depends on the plan. It can run on a shared server, a VPS or in the cloud, so how much is shared and how capacity grows also depend on the plan. WordPress.org recommends that the host support PHP 8.3 or later, MariaDB 10.11 or later or MySQL 8.0 or later, and HTTPS.

With dedicated hosting, a whole physical server works for a single customer. It shares no resources, and growing means a different or an additional machine. Who manages it depends on the contract, as with a VPS: the provider or the customer.

Hosting affects how quickly the server starts to respond. The web.dev guide to optimizing TTFB, last updated on 28 November 2025, puts hosting ahead of every other optimization. It says shared hosting is generally slower, which is probably fine for a small website serving mostly static files. With many users, personalization and database queries, the choice of hosting becomes critical. As a rough guide, web.dev rates a TTFB of 0.8 seconds or less as good.

Hosting also affects crawling. The server entry explains that Google lowers its crawl limit when a site slows down or responds with errors. Google's documentation adds what happens to the index: with 5xx errors or a 429, the crawlers temporarily slow down, and URLs that are already indexed are kept but eventually dropped if the error continues.

Moving hosts has its own effect. According to Google's guide to changing hosting without changing URLs, last updated on 10 December 2025, it is normal for Googlebot's crawl rate to drop right after the move and rise over the following days, sometimes above the previous level. The DNS entry covers the steps of the move.

That leaves the server's country. Google lists server location, derived from the IP address, as a possible signal of a site's intended audience, but not a definitive one, because many sites use CDNs or are hosted in countries with better infrastructure.

• Choose the hosting type by the real load: a site that builds every page from the database needs more than one serving static files.
• Ask the provider how much memory the site is allocated and whether it keeps PHP, the HTTP server and the database up to date.
• Check that the plan meets the WordPress.org requirements if the site runs on WordPress.
• Measure the TTFB of server-generated pages before and after a plan change.
• After a hosting move, check server errors and crawl stats in Search Console.

• Choosing by plan name, when "cloud" or "managed" mean different things at different providers.
• Running a high-traffic, database-driven site on a shared plan meant for small sites.
• Renting an unmanaged VPS with nobody to update the system.
• Treating repeated 5xx errors as temporary.
• Panicking over the drop in crawling right after a hosting move, which Google describes as normal.
• Hosting a site in a country only to rank there.