Web hosting
Web hosting is where your website physically runs: the computers that store your pages and serve them to visitors. Everything from five-dollar shared servers to global edge platforms is "hosting"; the differences show up as speed, uptime and maintenance burden.
Why it matters
Hosting choices surface as customer experience: slow servers tax every visit, outages take your shopfront offline, and neglected servers get hacked. Modern managed platforms have made most of this someone else's job: being on legacy hosting in 2026 is usually inertia, not strategy.
How it works
Traditional hosting rents you a server to look after. Managed platforms (the Webflow/Shopify model, or modern app platforms) bundle servers, security, scaling and deployment: you publish, they operate. Static and edge hosting push copies of the site close to visitors worldwide.
What to do about it
If anyone in your business still patches a web server, ask why. For marketing sites especially, managed platforms remove a whole category of risk for less than the cost of the worry.
