Web hosting is what supports every website. Sometimes it’s a clear and distinct service that you pay for (or get for free in some cases — other posts will follow on the main site), sometimes it’s there behind the scenes.
WordPress is a great way to illustrate this choice. It’s arguably the most important content management system on the web, available at full strength for everyone, for free. You can download it for free (it’s “open source” software being actively developed by a huge community) and run it on your own computer or on your own web host at WordPress.org (though most if not all web hosts have special tools to make this easy for you).
Or you can use it at WordPress.com, a classic Freemium service operated by the company that is (sort of) the commercial arm of WordPress. If you choose the commercial version, you can have a completely free website with a decent basic set of features, or at different fee levels you can add features and eventually take full control of your own private installation. The web hosting is bundled in with the service, managed by the company.
My Choice Of Hosting
I already pay for a web hosting package that I really like (though it’s not quite perfect), from Guru.co.uk, that I’m going to call “premium commodity hosting.” The plan I use (called “Shared Hosting Boost”) is maybe 2-3x the cost of typical super cheap web hosting, but to offset that I’ve found it’s excellent in terms of performance, and support is friendly and responsive. The hosting plan I have easily supports a number of independent WordPress websites, using a system called LiteSpeed that, in my experience, helps most WordPress sites perform very well without a lot of work.
Disclosure
I should say that links I publish here may give me referral income (which is sometimes, but not always, accompanied by you getting a better deal too) that offsets the real external costs of the services that I use to help churches improve and enlarge their digital resources.
I need to add a few details here. Apart from the hosting from Guru that I really like, I also use other paid hosting.
My favourite cheap but excellent quality hosting comes from Hawkhost. I use its cheapest package, and that’s great both for testing things out and for maintaining a couple of very simple websites I put together years ago. I’ve tried a few very cheap UK web hosts, but my experience with Hawkhost has been consistent, excellent service and support that gives me huge confidence in preferring them to all others. There’s a technical caveat. Their nearest server location to the UK (at time of writing) is in Amsterdam, which is in the EU, so you should review your data policy if you use them to hold any personal data.