Hosting Guides

Server location adds travel time to every uncached request, roughly 1 millisecond per 100 km per round trip, and a new secure connection needs about three round trips. Google treats server location as a weak signal for which country a site targets, so the decision is mostly about speed. This guide shows the latency math by distance, what a CDN fixes and what it leaves to the origin, how hosts handle data center choice, and how to pick the right region from your own analytics.

PHP workers cap how many uncached WordPress requests run at once. See Kinsta's thread counts per plan and how many workers a blog or store needs.

Cheap VPS hosting under $10/month in 2026 buys 1 vCPU, 1-4GB RAM, NVMe storage, and 1-4TB bandwidth, all unmanaged. We compare entry VPS plans from Hostinger, DigitalOcean, Vultr, and IONOS with intro vs renewal pricing as of June 2026, spell out the managed-vs-unmanaged line that defines the price, and show exactly who should buy a budget VPS and who should skip it. Includes a provider-by-provider spec table with an editorial verdict per plan, the RAM floor for running WordPress, the NVMe and bandwidth units that actually matter, and how to read the renewal trap before you lock into a long upfront term. The short version: the price tag is not the cost, and the right answer depends entirely on whether you want to be your own system administrator. Faceless, data-forward, buyer-first, no advertorial.

Hosting with a free domain is free for one year only. See hosting renewals, .com renewal prices and the 60-day transfer lock compared.

Sponsored feature. Hostinger funded this testing and supplied product access. HostingDive retained full control over testing methodology, findings, and conclusions. Hostinger's review of this article was limited to checking factual accuracy about its own products, specifications, and pricing. By the HostingDive Team VPS sizing can focus on RAM first. Buyers ask how much RAM the ... Read more

Every host advertises 24/7 support, but the phrase describes when a chat window is staffed rather than what anyone will fix. This article maps the responsibility boundary across shared, managed WordPress, and unmanaged VPS tiers, showing which problems move between tiers and which never move at any price. It explains the tier structure behind the chat window and why first-line availability is near-universal while overnight engineering escalation is not. It covers support channels and where contractual response times actually live, then breaks down what an uptime SLA credit is worth in practice, why it is calculated against your hosting fee rather than lost revenue, and the claim window most buyers miss.

Most migration downtime traces to two DNS sequencing mistakes: pointing nameservers before the site is ready, and leaving a 24-hour TTL in place through the cutover. This guide separates nameservers from records, explains why TTL decides your rollback window rather than your propagation speed, lists the records that break email when they are forgotten, and gives an eight-step cutover sequence.

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.