When a visitor opens your site, the request passes five stops before they see a single character: DNS, an encrypted connection, the web server, the application, and the database. Hosting is where most of those stops live, which is why it shapes your site’s speed and stability more than any theme or plugin. This guide walks through the path briefly, the types of hosting and what you pay for in each, the numbers to compare providers by, and what to check before you buy and in the first hour after.
01How a request reaches your site
- 01DNS: The browser asks for your domain’s IP address; the resolver answers from its cache if it has the answer, or asks the domain’s authoritative name servers. How long the answer is cached is set by the you give each record.
- 02TCP and TLS: The browser opens a connection to the server and agrees on encryption. With TLS 1.3 the handshake takes a single round trip, so the distance between server and visitor shows up right here.
- 03Web server: Software such as LiteSpeed, Nginx or Apache receives the request. If the page is in the cache, it sends it straight away.
- 04Application: Otherwise it hands the request to the application, such as PHP in WordPress, to build the page.
- 05Database: The application queries the database for the content, and this is where storage speed and memory size make themselves felt.
The total of these stops until the first byte of the response arrives is the (TTFB). You can measure it for your domain with one command that breaks down each stage:
# Time for each stage, cumulative from the startcurl -o /dev/null -s -w "dns: %{time_namelookup}s\nconnect: %{time_connect}s\ntls: %{time_appconnect}s\nttfb: %{time_starttransfer}s\ntotal: %{time_total}s\n" https://maktabat-alsour.com/
The figures are cumulative. If the gap between tls and ttfb is large, the slowness is in the server, the application or the database; if connect itself is large, the server is far from the visitor or the route to it is congested. As a rough guide, a TTFB up to 0.8 seconds is acceptable, and a cached page on a nearby server usually comes in under 0.2 seconds. We cover DNS and record propagation in a separate article on the blog.
02Hosting types: what you’re paying for
The difference between the types isn’t “faster or slower”. It comes down to three questions: what you share with others, who runs the server, and how you grow when your site grows.
| Type | What you share | Who runs the server | Scaling | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shared | The whole server, with resource limits per account | The provider | A bigger plan, within the server’s ceiling | Brochure sites, blogs and small stores |
| VPS | Only the hardware; your OS and its kernel are your own | You, with root access | Resource upgrades, usually without moving | Growing stores and apps, and anyone needing custom settings |
| Dedicated server | Nothing | You | A bigger machine or more machines | Heavy, steady workloads and software licensed per machine |
| Cloud | A cluster of servers with elastic resources | You or the provider, depending on the service | Servers added and removed automatically | Fluctuating traffic and systems that need high availability |
| Managed WordPress | Usually shared infrastructure or containers | The provider, down to WordPress updates | Per the provider’s plans | Anyone who wants fast WordPress without technical admin |
Each of these comparisons has its own article on the blog: VPS versus VDS, VPS versus cloud hosting, choosing your company’s hosting by its stage, and tuning WordPress for good performance.
03The numbers to compare providers by
- TTFB: Measure it with the command above on a test site at the provider, from somewhere close to your audience, in the morning and at peak time. A single reading in a quiet hour isn’t enough.
- Uptime: is a percentage that hides minutes: 99.9% means 43 minutes of downtime in a 30-day month, and 99.97% about 13. Read what the agreement measures and what it excludes, since it measures the provider’s infrastructure, not your application.
- IOPS: is the number of read and write operations the storage completes per second, and it governs database speed. A spinning disk manages about 100 to 200, a SATA SSD tens of thousands, and NVMe hundreds of thousands. But providers cap it per account or per server, so ask what the cap is.
- Bandwidth and transfer: Port speed, such as 1 Gbit/s, sets how much you can move per second, while monthly , such as 200 GB, sets how much you can move in the whole month. With 2 MB pages, 200 GB covers about 100,000 page views.
04Before you buy: six things to check
- Location and latency: Pick a data centre close to most of your visitors, and measure latency to it with ping or mtr from their network before you buy. Every 1,000 kilometres adds about 10 milliseconds to the round trip at best, and real routes are longer.
- Backups and restores: How often are backups taken, how many days are they kept, and are they on another server? Can you restore a single file yourself, or do you wait for support? That last question matters most.
- Control panel: cPanel and Plesk are the most widespread, and a full backup exported from one can usually be restored at another provider running the same panel. Each has its own hands-on guide on the blog.
- Technical support: Ask a real technical question before you buy, such as which PHP versions are available or what the memory limits are, and note how many minutes the reply took and whether it actually answered you.
- Upgrade path: Can you move from shared hosting to a VPS with the same provider? Can server resources be upgraded without a reinstall? On CoreVPS, for example, every resource can be upgraded later without reinstalling the OS.
- The exit: Register the domain in your own name, and make sure you can download a full copy of your files, database and email at any time. A good provider doesn’t need to lock you in.
05The first hour after buying
- 01Lower the TTL on your domain’s records to 300 seconds a day before the move, then point the records at the new server and follow their propagation with Illevante’s DNS propagation check.
- 02Turn on an SSL certificate and make sure it renews automatically: the maximum validity of public certificates has been 200 days since March 2026, and drops to 100 days in March 2027. Then inspect it with the SSL certificate check.
- 03Add SPF, DKIM and DMARC records if you’ll send email from your domain.
- 04Take a first backup, then try restoring a single file from it.
- 05Turn on two-factor authentication in the client area, and use SSH keys instead of passwords on VPS servers.
- 06Set up an external uptime check that alerts you before your visitors notice an outage.
Here are common symptoms in the first weeks, and what lies behind them:
- ProblemThe site is fast from your office but slow for your visitors
- FixMeasure connect from your visitors’ network. If it’s high, the problem is distance: pick a closer data centre, or put a content delivery network in front of static files.
- ProblemThe site goes down during campaigns although space and transfer are “unlimited”
- FixOpen the resource usage stats in the control panel: most likely your account hit its CPU or memory ceiling. Turn on page caching first, then upgrade the plan if you still need to.
- ProblemSome visitors still see the old site after the move
- FixThat’s a DNS cache that hasn’t expired yet. Keep the old server running until the full old TTL has passed.
06Practical recommendation
Start with the smallest plan that fits your current traffic plus a 30% margin, not what you might need in two years. What protects you from a wrong choice isn’t a big plan; it’s a provider that lets you upgrade without moving, backups you know how to restore, and a TTFB measurement you repeat every month. When that number climbs without any change to your site, that’s your cue to look for the cause before you look for a bigger plan.
If you’re starting a new site, Illevante’s cPanel hosting gives you LiteSpeed, NVMe storage and daily JetBackup backups, and when your site outgrows it you move to CoreVPS servers in whichever of the five operating data centres is closest to your visitors.
