Hosting is not the place to save money

The gap between cheap hosting and adequate hosting is a few pounds a month and most of your risk.

Hosting is invisible when it works, which is why it is the first line people cut. The saving is real and small. What it buys is a set of problems that are neither.

Shared hosting puts your site on a machine with hundreds of others. When one of them is attacked or simply popular, yours slows down, and there is nothing you can do about it from your end.

Backups are the part that matters most and gets checked least. The question is never whether backups exist. It is when one was last restored. A backup nobody has restored is a belief, not a safeguard.

Then there is what happens when something does go wrong at two in the morning. Cheap hosting answers by ticket, in business hours, in a timezone that is not yours.

None of this argues for the most expensive option. It argues for knowing three things about wherever you are: where the backups go, how long a restore takes, and who answers the phone.