Website Hosting Guidelines

What is Website Hosting?

Website hosting is like renting a storage unit for your belongings. Just as a storage unit holds your personal items in a rented space, a hosting provider stores your website’s files on a rented server.

When you need something from your storage unit, you visit the storage unit and retrieve your belongings. Accessing a website works the same way—except instead of visiting a physical location, users access your website through the Internet.

Whenever someone enters your website’s domain name (e.g., https://mywebsite.com) into their browser, the browser connects to the rented server, retrieves the necessary files, and displays the webpage.

Do I Need a Hosting Provider?

For 99% of people, the answer is yes. Hosting your own website requires technical expertise, specialized equipment, and ongoing maintenance—often making it more hassle than it’s worth in terms of time and cost. Even those who can self-host often choose not to.

A hosting provider takes care of everything, ensuring your website stays secure, accessible, and running smoothly.

Do You Have A Recommended Provider?

As of this article’s date (March 2025), we have not found a single best option—though we’ve certainly tried. Ultimately, for basic website hosting, almost any affordable host is probably good enough. We recommend searching for best wordpress hosting providers or cheap website hosting and comparing the available offers. Currently, there are about ten major providers and many smaller ones.

During our research, one provider that stood out slightly was Namecheap.com. Their “Stellar” shared hosting plan caught our attention due to its reasonable pricing—$1.98 per month for the first year and a $4.95 per month renewal fee. Other than the competitive pricing, we do not have a strong opinion on their overall service.

Hosting Providers Have Lost Their Minds

Website hosting used to be incredibly affordable. While reasonable prices are still available, costs can quickly skyrocket if you’re not careful.

What starts as a reasonable $36 first-year annual fee can turn into a $200 to $500 annual bill, catching many users off guard.

No basic or entry-level hosting plan is worth that price. Always check renewal rates upfront to avoid unexpected costs down the line.

Marketing Synanagins

First-Year Pricing

Many hosting providers use a bait-and-switch pricing strategy for entry-level plans. A low first-year rate seems like a bargain, but the real cost comes when it’s time renewal your plan—prices jump from $3–$7 per month to $20–$30 per month.

First year rates around $3 to $7 per month are still available at the majority of hosting companies. However, hosting providers now lure customers in with these same low first-year, introductory, or sale prices, only to increase annual renewal rates by 230% or more. What was once an affordable service can quickly become an annual expense of $200 to $500, as renewal rates jump from $3 to $7 per month to $12 to $49 per month.

Renews At the Than Current Rate

Instead of advertising a “sale” price of $3 per month with a regular rate of $12.95, hosting companies often use vague language like “renews at the then-current rate.” But what does that really mean?

The truth is, you have no way of knowing what the renewal price will be. They count on you accepting the new rate—no matter how high—because switching to another provider is often more hassle than paying the bill.

Beware of Upsells

When you check out, be prepared for an endless array—or at least a few—opportunities for the hosting provider to sell you additional services.

NOTE: Just because a hosting provider offers any of the following upsells, it does not automatically disqualify them as a potential host for your website. The purpose of this section is to highlight, in our opinion, the cost versus value of paying extra for these services.

Common Upsells Include:

• Free Trials
• Microsoft 365 Email
• Domain Privacy
• Deluxe Hosting
• Website Marketing
• Website Security
• Premium Backups

In our opinion, all of these services are nothing more than money grabs.

Free Trials

Whatever free trial is offered, we’re pretty certain you don’t need it for your MACE Website. After all, free trials often translate to “we won’t bill you until you’ve forgotten about it so we can silently keep billing you.”

Microsoft 365 Email

For your MACE Website, a private email is unnecessary, let alone upgrading to an enterprise-level platform like Microsoft 365 Email. Microsoft 365 is designed more for businesses or individuals who use Microsoft Outlook and want all their email in a single access point.

Most hosting accounts already include a free email package (and they should).

Your MACE Website is designed for accessing alarm data, not for public use or sending/receiving communications. While we don’t think you’ll need that feature, if you do want email, why pay for it when you can usually get it for free?

Domain Privacy

We find it outrageous that some hosting providers charge for domain privacy, labeling it as an upgraded or additional service—often costing between $12 and $24 per year.

When you register a domain name through a domain registrar, this feature is typically included for free. For more details, refer to Tip #5: Enable Domain Privacy in our Domain Name Guidelines.

Website Security

When a hosting provider offers an upgrded security option, that seems to make a claim that your website and account is somehow less secure without upgrading to their premium security package, it’s worth questioning the validity of their offer.

While hosting providers can offer general protection, they cannot fully mitigate the vulnerabilities inherent to your website platform unless they offer a fully managed hosting solution. Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are inherently subject to security concerns. These concerns are typically beyond the scope of what a hosting provider can control. However, all hosting providers should offer a solid level of security that protects your website from common threats, and this level of security should be included for free.

If a hosting provider’s security upgrade is not tailored specifically to your CMS platform (for example, if it doesn’t address specific concerns for WordPress), it’s likely an upsell that won’t provide much added value and does more for the hosting provider’s bottom line than your website.

On the other hand, if their upgrade claims to improve security for WordPress, it may not be comprehensive enough to make a significant difference in securing your site. Often, these add-ons are limited in scope and may not provide robust protection.

For your MACE Website, the consequences of a security breach are typically limited to losing alarm data and the time required to fix or reinstall the site. Hopefully, you have automated backups enabled, so you can easily restore your site or ask your hosting provider to do so from their backups.

If you consider your MACE alarm data critical, it’s a good idea to use a third-party WordPress plugin to back up your entire site

With over 20 years of experience in WordPress development, we generally don’t rely on security plugins or third-party services like Wordfence or Sucuri for critical websites. Instead, we recommend hosting providers with strong, robust security defenses that can stop most attacks before they reach your site. While WordPress is frequently patched for security vulnerabilities as they are discovered, your hosting provider should also be actively managing and patching their servers to protect against known threats.

In short, strong hosting security combined with regular backups is the best approach to safeguard your MACE Website.

Premium Backups

Not all basic-level accounts include website backups, but most do offer some form of backup, which is generally sufficient and free—especially for a basic website like your MACE Website.

In our opinion, paying for extra backup services is not necessary and there are far better and more robust ways to backup your MACE Website.

Other Add-Ons

The remaining extras, such as Deluxe Hosting and Website Marketing, are often just automated features with little guarantee of making a significant impact—other than increasing your costs.

Final Thoughts

When choosing a hosting provider for your MACE Website, it’s important to remember that not all add-ons are created equal. While certain services, such as website security and premium backups, may seem essential, they often don’t provide enough added value to justify their costs. In fact, many of these upgrades are simply automated features that are either unnecessary or already included with your hosting plan.

The key to maintaining a secure and functional MACE Website is to focus on strong, reliable hosting with robust security measures and regular backups. There’s no need to pay for extras that provide little to no real benefit, and it’s always wise to question the legitimacy of upsells that don’t offer genuine value.

By keeping these factors in mind, you can make informed decisions about your hosting needs and avoid the pitfalls of inflated prices and unnecessary upgrades.