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People ask me regularly which host to take. The list below is deliberately short: I name only what I run sites on myself, or ran long enough to know the weak spots. Recommending from someone else’s review is a way of letting down the person who trusted you.
How to choose in general is covered in a separate article — server location, hosting type, limits, backups. This one is about specifics.
What this site runs on
The site you are reading sits on Hostinger, on a plan with LiteSpeed and servers in Europe. What matters to me here: the server is inside the EU, so there is no third-country transfer to describe; LiteSpeed instead of Apache, which is a noticeable difference in WordPress speed; and a sane renewal price rather than a first-year discount that triples in year two.
What not to expect: this is not managed hosting with a personal engineer. Updates, backups and security stay with you or your contractor.
What I look for when choosing hosting for a client
- A server inside the EU. Not only speed — it removes a whole section of privacy-policy work.
- A staging copy. Without it, updates happen on the live site, and one day that ends badly.
- Self-service restore. Not “write to support”, but a button you press and a restore time you can predict.
- An honest renewal price. Compare the second year, not the first.
- Support in a language you speak. One email before paying will tell you.
You choose a host once and live with it for years. Saving ten euros a month pays off exactly until the first outage on a working day.
What I do not recommend
Do not take a VPS “to grow into” unless someone nearby knows how to maintain it: an unpatched server is more dangerous than any cheap shared plan. And do not take hosting from your domain registrar just because it is convenient — it is almost always the weakest plan sold as convenience.
One more: never migrate on a Friday evening. A migration planned in advance takes an evening; an emergency one takes the weekend.
Disclaimer
Company names and logos belong to their owners and are mentioned for information only. I do not represent these companies. The list will grow as I gain experience worth sharing.