Malcolm's Ramblings

I work in hosting, so I spend a lot of time thinking about the gap between what website hosting costs and the value people expect from it.

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Note: I currently work for Pressable, and previously worked for Acquia. I also co-ran a small managed WordPress hosting company called PressTitan for several years. I am extremely biased in this discussion but my opinions are my own and are not meant to reflect my employers, current or previous.

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Inexpensive hosting absolutely has a place. Not every site needs much. A personal blog, a small brochure site, a side project, a low-stakes informational site, those can often live quite happily on a lower-cost plan. There is nothing wrong with that.

The problem starts when businesses treat revenue-connected websites the same way.

Once a website is generating leads, sales, bookings, memberships, or carrying a meaningful piece of customer trust, hosting stops being a simple utility and it becomes part of the operating environment. It affects speed, reliability, recovery, flexibility, and how quickly problems can be understood and fixed when something goes sideways.

And that is where I think the mental model that people often have gets a bit off.

A lot of businesses want great performance, thoughtful support, strong reliability, and real guidance when things get messy. That is completely reasonable. I would want the same. But those outcomes do not come from infrastructure alone, they come from expertise. That is the expensive part.

The people who can look at a slow store, a tangled plugin stack, a caching issue, or a fragile migration and figure out what is actually happening are not cheap, and they should not be. That kind of judgment is built over time. It comes from experience, context, pattern recognition, and usually a fair amount of hard-won scars.

So when the market keeps pushing hosting toward lower and lower price points, there is an understandable tension. Providers are asked to deliver deeper expertise, faster support, and stronger outcomes, while also compressing the revenue that funds those things in the first place.

That tension has consequences.

Support can become more generic. Teams have less time for higher-context problem solving. It gets harder to retain deeply experienced people. The platform may still look solid on paper, but the human layer can get thinner. For a lot of customers, that human layer is actually the part they value most once the site becomes important and something AI can’t easily replace.

Customers want to know that when something gets weird, and it usually does eventually, someone can reason through it clearly. Someone can separate the real issue from the noise. Someone can explain the tradeoffs and help move toward a better outcome without turning the whole thing into a three-week maze of uncertainty.

That is not really a commodity experience.

Unfortunately, I also think hosting companies, as an industry, helped create some of this confusion. Hosting is often sold through simple comparison tables, louder promises, and lower prices. That makes it easy to shop, but it can hide the part that matters most for serious websites: alignment.

If your website is tied closely to revenue or operations, underinvesting in hosting can create a weird kind of false economy. The monthly bill looks efficient, but the costs can reappear elsewhere through slower performance, weaker support, longer incident recovery, more internal stress, or more time spent compensating for problems upstream.

This is not an argument for “more expensive is always better.” It is an argument for matching the hosting investment to the importance and complexity of the site. As the web gets more dynamic, more integrated, and more operationally important, expertise matters more, not less.

So yes, commodity hosting should exist. It serves a real need, but I think more businesses should be honest about when their website has crossed the line from simple web presence to real business infrastructure. Once that happens, the cheapest option is not always the most affordable one.

What would I like to see businesses spend on their web hosting? Well, a simple rule of thumb I’d love to see get spread as some kind of business gospel is that a website seen helping earning revenue should likely cost around two percent of that revenue in hosting fees.

If your business is doing a million dollars a year, and the website is helping drive that, then a $20,000 annual hosting bill should not feel outrageous. That is not just paying for server space, it is paying for a revenue-critical part of the business to perform reliably.

Featured image created using ChatGPT.