What is Hosting

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  • Updated: December 29, 2025

TL;DR: What is hosting? Hosting is the service that stores your website’s files on a server and delivers them to visitors’ browsers when they request your site.


It affects speed, reliability, security, and ongoing costs, and it can influence sustainability through data centre energy, infrastructure efficiency, and how much data your site needs to move.


This guide explains hosting in plain English, breaks down the main hosting types, and shows what “eco friendly hosting” actually means in practice for UK businesses as of 2025.

Key Takeaways

  • Web hosting is the infrastructure and service that publishes your website to the internet and serves it to visitors on demand.
  • Hosting choices influence performance, uptime, security posture, scalability, and total cost of ownership, not just “where the site lives”.
  • Eco friendly hosting is meaningful when it is verifiable and paired with an efficient website that reduces data transfer and compute.
  • A fast, lightweight site can reduce hosting load, improve user experience, and align with Google’s page experience signals.
  • There is no single “best hosting” for every site; the right choice depends on traffic patterns, complexity, risk tolerance, and support needs.

web hosting cable

 

Hosting is one of those website topics people tolerate until something goes wrong: the site slows down, emails stop arriving, renewals spike, or a plugin update breaks everything at 9pm on a Friday.

Like one of our clients, they had an outage for 15mins just before Christmas – Yes, it’s very annoying – but in the grand scheme of things, they’ve had an uptime of 99.99715% across the year. That’s how good our Eco Hosting is.

If you sell anything online, rely on enquiries, or simply do not want your brand to look amateurish, hosting is not a background detail. It is a business dependency.

And if you are using this article to make smarter sustainability choices, hosting matters because the infrastructure that serves your pages uses energy. The best outcome is a verifiably greener platform paired with an efficient website that does not waste data, CPU, and user time.

What Is Hosting?

Hosting is a service that stores your website’s files on internet-connected servers and delivers them to visitors when they load your website.

Your website is made of assets: HTML, CSS, images, fonts, JavaScript, and often a database and application code (for example, WordPress). Hosting is the environment that keeps those assets available 24/7 and serves them quickly when someone types your domain into a browser.

Think of it like a shop premises for your website. The domain is the address, the website files are the stock and layout, and the hosting is the building, power, and security that make it usable to the public.

If your goal is sustainable web design, hosting is one part of the system. The other part is how heavy your pages are and how efficiently they are built. If you want the sustainable angle framed as a business benefit, start here:
sustainable digital tools for business websites.

 

How Does Web Hosting Work?

When someone visits your domain, DNS points their request to a server, and that server returns the files and data needed to render the page.

Most hosting explanations skip the practical chain of events. This is the chain that matters when you are troubleshooting speed or reliability.

Domain names and DNS

DNS is the system that translates your domain name into the IP address of your hosting server.

When someone types your domain, their device asks the DNS system where that domain “lives”. Your host (or your DNS provider) answers with records that route the visitor to the right place.

Servers, requests, and responses

A server receives a request, runs any required application logic, and sends back the page files to the visitor.

If your site is static (simple brochure site), the server can often respond with files immediately. If your site is dynamic (WordPress, ecommerce), the server may need to run code, query a database, and assemble the page response.

Databases and dynamic websites

Dynamic sites often store content and settings in a database, which the server queries to build each page.

WordPress is the common UK example. The “page” is often not one file, it is generated. That means hosting quality matters, but so does your build quality: plugins, caching, image handling, and third-party scripts.

 

What Are the Main Types of Hosting?

The main hosting types are shared, VPS, dedicated, managed platforms, and cloud, each trading cost against performance, control, and support.

Hosting companies use marketing labels, but the underlying categories are consistent. The right choice depends on traffic, complexity, and how much technical responsibility you want.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting places many websites on one server, which keeps costs low but reduces performance predictability.

Shared hosting is fine for very small sites with low traffic and simple functionality. It becomes risky when your site is business-critical or when other sites on the same server create load spikes.

VPS hosting

A VPS is a virtual private server, giving you a defined slice of resources on a physical server.

VPS hosting offers better isolation than shared hosting and typically better performance. It is often a sensible middle ground for growing UK businesses that need reliability but do not want dedicated hardware costs.

Dedicated hosting

Dedicated hosting gives you an entire physical server, offering maximum control and capacity at a higher cost.

Dedicated servers are usually for high-traffic sites, complex applications, or stricter compliance and control requirements. For most SMEs, it is more than you need.

Managed WordPress hosting

Managed WordPress hosting bundles performance tuning, updates, backups, and security features designed specifically for WordPress.

This is often the best fit for a WordPress business site if you want fewer operational headaches. The value is not just speed, it is support and reduced risk. It is also where eco friendly hosting can be easiest to validate, because managed hosts tend to publish clearer infrastructure policies.

Cloud hosting

cloud hosting

Cloud hosting runs your site on scalable infrastructure, often across multiple machines, improving resilience and capacity planning.

Cloud can be excellent for variable traffic, but it can also introduce cost unpredictability if it is poorly configured. If your site is light and steady, cloud can be overkill.

If you want a practical, UK-focused take on sustainable site choices beyond hosting, see:
eco friendly web design is the future.

 

What Does “Good Hosting” Actually Look Like?

Good hosting delivers consistent speed, high uptime, secure defaults, clear support, and sensible backups, without hidden renewal traps.

Ignore the feature bingo. Most business owners need five things that work reliably:

  • Performance under real load: not just a “fast server”, but caching support, modern PHP versions where relevant, and sensible resource allocation.
  • Uptime and incident transparency: frequent outages do not always show up in sales calls. Look for status pages and clear incident comms.
  • Backups you can actually restore: automatic backups are only useful if restores are straightforward and tested.
  • Security basics by default: HTTPS support, malware scanning (where appropriate), secure access controls, and sane update policies.
  • Human support: if your business relies on enquiries, your time-to-fix matters more than a theoretical spec sheet.

One real-world example from QED Web Design: on the Saffron Vanilla / The SV Group project, the website was migrated to an eco-friendly hosting platform to improve reliability while reducing environmental impact.
See the Saffron Vanilla Group case study.

A limitation worth stating clearly: hosting will not “fix” a bloated website. If you ship 6MB hero images, load multiple tracking tags, and run heavy plugins, even premium hosting will struggle. Hosting is a multiplier, not a magic wand.

 

What Is Eco Friendly Hosting?

Eco friendly hosting means your website runs on infrastructure that demonstrably reduces carbon impact, typically through renewable energy sourcing, efficiency, and transparent verification.

“Green hosting” gets abused as a phrase. As of 2025, the only version that matters is the version you can check: published energy sourcing, credible verification, and operational practices that reduce waste.

How to spot greenwashing

Treat vague claims as marketing until you can verify the provider’s energy evidence and environmental reporting.

  • Look for verification: for example, whether the provider is listed in an independent green hosting dataset or directory.
  • Ask what the claim means: “renewable powered” can mean direct renewable energy, matched certificates, or offsets. These are not the same.
  • Check operational transparency: credible providers explain what they do and how they measure it.

Here is the misconception that needs correcting: eco friendly hosting does not automatically mean a low-carbon website.
If your site is inefficient, the hosting may be greener, but your pages can still waste energy through excessive data transfer and compute.

Why your website build matters as much as the host

Efficient web design reduces page weight and server work, which cuts energy use and often improves user experience.

Sustainable web design is where the hosting choice becomes commercially useful. If you reduce page weight, simplify templates, and remove unnecessary scripts, you often get:
faster load times, lower bounce rates, and fewer server resources consumed per visit.

If you want a straight definition of sustainable web design (and how hosting fits into it), use:
what is sustainable web design.

 

Hosting and Security for UK Small Businesses

Hosting affects your security baseline through updates, access controls, backups, and incident response, so UK SMEs should prioritise secure defaults and clear responsibilities.

Most small business website compromises are not Hollywood hacks. They are weak passwords, outdated plugins, exposed admin paths, and missing backups. Hosting will not eliminate those risks, but it can reduce them with better defaults and support.

A practical rule: if you do not have in-house technical resource, do not buy a hosting plan that expects you to be a sysadmin. Choose support and managed maintenance over theoretical control.

If you are already on WordPress, maintenance is part of the hosting conversation, because an unmaintained site creates risk. QED’s approach is to keep sites stable and updated, while protecting performance and SEO:
WordPress maintenance services.

 

Common Hosting Misconceptions (Fixed)

The biggest hosting mistakes come from assuming hosting alone controls speed, SEO, and security, when it is only one part of a wider system.

Misconception 1: “Better hosting automatically means top Google rankings”

Reality: Hosting can improve speed and uptime, which supports user experience, but rankings still depend on relevance, content quality, and the full technical build.

Misconception 2: “My site is slow, so it must be hosting”

Reality: Slow sites are often slow because of design choices: oversized images, heavy themes, third-party scripts, and inefficient plugins. Hosting can only compensate so far.

Misconception 3: “Eco hosting is just a badge”

Reality: When verifiable, eco hosting is a legitimate infrastructure choice. The mistake is treating it as the whole story instead of pairing it with efficient web design.

If you want a practical lens on how performance and UX connect to search visibility, use:
impact of web design on SEO.

 

A Quick Hosting Checklist Before You Buy

Use this checklist to match hosting to your site’s risk and complexity, and to validate sustainability claims without relying on marketing.

  • What are you hosting? Simple brochure site, WordPress, ecommerce, booking system, or custom application?
  • How business-critical is uptime? If enquiries and sales depend on it, prioritise support, monitoring, and recovery.
  • Backups: How often, where stored, and can you restore without a support ticket?
  • Security: HTTPS, access controls, malware scanning (if relevant), and update policies.
  • Performance: Does the host support caching and modern runtime versions where relevant?
  • Data location and compliance: Do you need UK or EU data residency, or is it not material to your business?
  • Sustainability verification: Is there credible evidence, third-party verification, or transparent reporting?
  • Renewal pricing: What will the plan cost after the first term, and what extras are charged separately?

If you want to talk through hosting and build choices as a single system, the sensible next step is a short review call rather than a blind plan purchase.
Contact QED Web Design.

 

Sources

what is hosting

To see the effect of our
content creation,
See our case study
on The SV Group

We created content over a six month period targeting key areas where their business wanted to expand 

See the case study here