Choosing your web hosting

Choosing web hosting comes down to picking between three families of plans, each suited to a need and a skill level. The right choice depends on what you are hosting, how much time you want to spend on it, and above all the real price over time.

Shared, VPS or managed

• Shared hosting splits one server between many sites. It is the cheapest, with no administration to do, but performance varies with your neighbours and the room for configuration is limited. Suited to a brochure site or a modest blog.
• A VPS gives you a virtual machine with dedicated resources and root access. You administer everything yourself: ideal if you are comfortable on the command line, more demanding otherwise.
• Managed hosting combines dedicated resources with operation by the host: updates, backups and monitoring are taken care of. It is the compromise for hosting seriously without becoming a sysadmin.

The criteria that matter

Beyond price, a few points make the difference:

• Performance: disk type (NVMe), CPU, and the presence of a cache. Beware of “unlimited” offers that hide caps.
• Backups: included or optional, frequency, retention, and how easy restoration is.
• Support: with us, replies by email, generally within a few hours during the day. We do not promise 24/7 support or a numbered SLA until it is real.
• Location: our managed plans run on our hardware in France; our VPS and unmanaged plans are in the European Union (Germany or Finland, Hetzner infrastructure).
• Renewal price: the most often overlooked criterion.

The traps to avoid

The main trap is the teaser price: a first year at under one euro a month that triples or quadruples at renewal. Always check the non-promotional rate. The second trap is the commitment: many attractive offers require one or two years paid upfront. With us, the advertised price is the renewal price, and there is no commitment.

Our approach

Our web plans include private analytics (Umami) and a status page, on Ryzen 9 7950X hardware with NVMe in RAID10, operated by the team that runs the ekaii infrastructure. Payment is by card or cryptocurrency, with no account required.

To go further, compare our web hosting plans, our managed WordPress hosting, and our dated price comparisons.