HostingDive Team

A 30-day money-back guarantee is not a free trial. It typically covers the hosting fee only, excludes the free domain and add-ons, runs from the order date rather than go-live, and does not apply to renewals. This guide covers the four recurring exclusions, why the usable evaluation window is shorter than it looks, how to test support deliberately before you need it, and the five things to do before the deadline passes.

Most hosting plans now list a free CDN, and Cloudflare's own Free plan includes one at $0 per month, so the feature line alone says little. This guide explains what a CDN caches by default, why the HTML page usually is not, where full-page edge caching breaks on WooCommerce and membership sites, and which buyers should weight CDN setup heavily in a hosting decision.

Staging is the hosting feature most often assumed present and most often absent: standard on managed WordPress, common on higher shared tiers, routinely missing from the entry-level plan being advertised. What it does, where the push-to-live step destroys data, and the four questions that decide whether an included staging feature is usable.

Leaving a host is four migrations treated as one: files and database, email, DNS, and the domain registration. Email is the one that loses mail, and the domain carries a 60-day ICANN transfer lock that can add two months to an otherwise-ready switch. The sequence that works, and the cancellation traps at the end of it.

Shared hosting accounts are rarely suspended for bandwidth. They are suspended for exceeding the inode cap, exhausting concurrent entry processes, or violating the acceptable use policy, and the first two are published in the terms of service rather than on the plan page. That gap matters, because a site can hit both while using a fraction of its advertised storage and transfer. This guide explains what an inode actually counts, why entry-process exhaustion produces 508 errors that uptime monitors do not see, which site types hit which ceiling first, how to check both numbers in cPanel before a warning email arrives, and why the fix is usually VPS rather than a larger shared plan.

Professional malware cleanup runs $150-$500 one-time or $200-$500/year bundled, and the free malware removal advertised on budget shared hosting covers a narrower set of cases than buyers assume. This guide breaks down what each hosting tier actually does after a detection, why suspension is the likeliest outcome on shared plans, the four contract details that decide what an incident costs, and which tier is worth buying by site type. Pricing as of August 2026.

WordPress.org recommends PHP 7.4 or greater, MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.5, and HTTPS. Those are the floor for the software to run, not the specification for a site that stays up. This guide separates the published requirements from what a plugin-loaded site actually needs, covering PHP version as a security decision on the php.net support schedule, the memory cap that overrides anything you write in wp-config, the max_input_vars default that fails silently on WooCommerce, and why a persistent object cache is the one setting that speeds up logged-in traffic. Includes an eight-row spec table and what to ask a host before buying.