What does web hosting actually do?

If your website were a shop, hosting would be the building it sits in. Your domain name (yourbusiness.com) is the street address. The website itself is the shop fittings and stock. Hosting is the land, the walls, the electricity and the lock on the door.

Every time a customer types your address or taps a link, their phone asks a computer somewhere, "send me this page." That computer is a server, and keeping it running, fast and safe is what a hosting company does.

The parts you never see

Good hosting involves a lot of quiet work:

• Keeping the server online. Hardware fails, networks hiccup, and someone has to notice at 3am.
• Applying security updates. New vulnerabilities turn up every week. Unpatched servers are the easiest targets on the internet.
• Taking backups. Copies of your site stored somewhere else, so a mistake or an attack is an inconvenience, not a disaster.
• Serving pages quickly. Caching and content delivery networks get your pages to customers' phones in a fraction of a second.
• Managing certificates. The padlock in the browser bar needs renewing regularly, or visitors see a scary warning.

Why it matters to a small business

When hosting goes wrong, it usually goes wrong at the worst time: a busy Saturday, the week of a big promotion, the morning a journalist links to you. Customers who hit an error page rarely try twice.

Cheap hosting isn't always bad hosting, but very cheap hosting usually means one thing has been cut: the people. The servers might be fine until something breaks, and then you're on your own with a help forum.

What to look for

Whoever you host with, ask four questions:

1. How often are backups taken, and who restores them?
2. Is SSL included and renewed automatically?
3. What does it cost after the first year?
4. When something breaks, can I talk to a person?

If the answers are vague, keep looking. Your website is often the first impression a customer has of your business, and it deserves solid ground to stand on.