Web hosting should be the easy part of building a website, yet the plans are a thicket of jargon, fine print and prices that change at renewal. Kracked is a plain-English guide to hosting: what the different types do, how to compare providers honestly, and which option fits the site you are actually building. No hype, no unlimited promises, just the explanations we wish someone had given us first.
Start here
If you are new to hosting, two guides cover the ground fastest. The first explains the five kinds of hosting and who each one suits. The second walks through the features that decide whether you will still be happy a year from now.
The main types of web hosting explained
Shared, VPS, cloud, dedicated and managed WordPress, what each one does and where the trade-offs sit.
How to choose a web hosting provider
Uptime, speed, support, room to grow and the renewal price. The features that actually matter.
Shared hosting vs VPS hosting
The cheap, crowded option against guaranteed resources and real control, and when to move up.
What is cloud hosting and how it works
How a pool of servers scales through traffic spikes, and where the surprise bills hide.
Managed vs unmanaged WordPress hosting
Pay the host to handle updates, caching and security, or keep control and do it yourself.
Web hosting terms every beginner should know
Bandwidth, uptime, SSL, CDN, DNS and the rest of the jargon, decoded in plain language.
Which hosting type fits your site?
| If you are building | Start with | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A blog or small business site | Shared or managed WordPress | Cheap, simple, genuinely enough |
| A growing site or small app | VPS hosting | Guaranteed resources and control |
| Traffic that spikes or scales fast | Cloud hosting | Flexes with demand, stays up |
| A large, busy, database-heavy site | Dedicated hosting | A whole machine, maximum control |
| A WordPress site you would rather not maintain | Managed WordPress | Updates and security handled for you |
How we think about hosting
Good hosting advice is boring on purpose. We favour the smallest plan that comfortably fits your project, because upgrading later is easy and overbuying wastes money. We read the renewal price, not just the sign-up offer. And we treat unlimited as a marketing word rather than a technical fact. When we mention a provider, from Hostinger to Kinsta to DigitalOcean, it is as an example of a category, not a sales pitch. Pick the guide that matches your question above and work from there.