Why We Refuse to Have a Budget Hosting Tier
Most agencies sell hosting in good, better, and best. We sell one stack, and every client is on it. Here is what cheap hosting actually costs a business, and why we decided nobody should be on it.
Pull up the hosting page of almost any web agency and you will see a ladder. A basic tier for small budgets, a standard tier for most people, and a premium tier with the words “enterprise” and “priority” somewhere in the description. The implication is clear: the more you pay, the safer your site is.
We do not have a ladder. Every site we build, on every plan, runs on exactly the same infrastructure. A six-page site for a one-person business gets the same hosting as our largest client. This was a deliberate decision, and this article is about why we made it.
What “budget hosting” actually means
Cheap hosting is cheap because of what it leaves out, and what it leaves out is precisely the stuff that protects a business.
A shared server. Your site lives on one machine alongside hundreds of others. When one of them gets a traffic spike or gets hacked, everyone on the box slows down. You never find out why your site was crawling on Tuesday.
One location. The server is in a single data center. A visitor across the country waits for every request to travel there and back. On mobile, that delay is the difference between a page that feels instant and one that feels broken.
Minimal security. Basic tiers typically skip the web application firewall, rate limiting, and bot filtering that stop attacks before they reach your site. Security becomes something you add with a plugin, which means it runs on the same overloaded server it is supposed to protect.
Backups you have to think about. Daily backups at best, often retained for a week, sometimes an upsell. When something breaks on Friday and you notice on Monday, you find out what “daily” really meant.
Nobody watching. No uptime monitoring, no alerts, no one who notices the site is down until a customer tells you.
None of this is a scandal. It is what a few dollars a month buys. The scandal is putting a business’s front door on it and calling it a tier.
What the ladder does to an agency
Here is the part agencies do not say out loud. The moment you sell hosting in tiers, you have created an incentive to make the bottom tier feel inadequate. The basic plan has to be worse, visibly, or nobody upgrades.
So agencies end up running two or three different infrastructures, supporting all of them, and spending sales conversations explaining why the client should pay more for the thing that should have been standard. Meanwhile, the clients who chose the budget tier, usually the smallest businesses with the least margin for error, are the ones who get the outage.
We did not want to be in that business. It is more work, and it puts the worst experience on the people who can least afford it.
What every one of our sites runs on
Instead of a ladder, we picked the stack we would want for our own site and put everyone on it.
Static code, not a live server. Your site is compiled into finished files ahead of time. There is no database to fall over, no server-side process to overload, and nothing for an attacker to inject into.
Version control. Every change is recorded in Git. Any previous version of your site can be restored in minutes, which makes backups continuous rather than daily and makes rollback a routine operation rather than an emergency.
Cloudflare’s global edge network. Your site is copied to hundreds of locations worldwide and served from the one nearest each visitor. This is the same network that fronts some of the largest sites on the internet, and it is why we can guarantee a 95+ PageSpeed score.
Security at the edge. Automatic SSL, DDoS protection, and a web application firewall sit in front of your site, not on it. Attacks are absorbed before they reach anything that matters.
Monitoring. Uptime, performance, and security events are watched continuously. If something changes, we know before you do.
Call this enterprise hosting if you like. We just call it hosting, because it is the only kind we offer.
The math that makes it possible
Someone will ask how a $149-a-month plan can include infrastructure like this. The answer is that static sites on an edge network are cheap to run at scale, far cheaper than a fleet of servers assembling pages on demand. The expensive part of hosting has always been the moving parts. We removed the moving parts.
That means we can put every client on the best stack we know of without it being a loss leader. There is no premium tier because there is nothing left to upgrade to.
What this means for you
You do not have to evaluate hosting options, because there is one. You do not have to wonder whether you chose the tier that will hold up, because everyone is on the tier that holds up. And you do not have to worry that your site is the small one on the shared box, because there is no shared box.
We refuse to compromise on hosting, security, and speed. We think you should refuse too, and the easiest way to make that possible was to take the option off the table.
