Hosting for Beginners: Your First 30 Days After Signing Up

Days 1 Through 3: Account Setup and Going Live

What Happens the Moment You Complete Your Purchase

The moment you finish signing up for your first hosting plan, an automated provisioning system springs into action behind the scenes, allocating storage space, configuring your control panel, creating your databases, and establishing the server environment where your website will live. Within minutes — sometimes seconds — you will receive a welcome email containing your account credentials, your control panel login URL, your FTP or SFTP connection details, and a temporary URL that lets you begin building your site before your domain even points to the server. This temporary URL is one of the most valuable tools available to beginners because it eliminates the waiting period traditionally associated with launching a new site, allowing you to install software, upload files, and preview everything perfectly while DNS propagation runs its course in the background. I have watched thousands of beginners over the past fifteen years go through this exact process, and the ones who immediately log in and start exploring their control panel invariably build confidence faster than those who wait passively for everything to happen on its own. The hosting for beginners first steps truly begin the minute you see that welcome email land in your inbox, and taking action right away sets a productive tone for the entire month ahead.

Nameserver Configuration and DNS Propagation Explained

If you registered your domain through a different company than your hosting provider, your first technical task is updating your domain's nameservers to point to the servers operated by your hosting company. Nameservers are essentially the signposts of the internet — they tell the global Domain Name System where to find the authoritative records for your specific domain, and changing them redirects all traffic from your old destination to your new hosting account. Your hosting provider's welcome email will list their nameserver addresses, which typically look something like ns1.yourhost.com and ns2.yourhost.com, and you will paste these into the DNS management section of your domain registrar's control panel. Once you save that change, the process of DNS propagation begins: the updated nameserver information spreads outward from your registrar to the root nameservers, then to top-level domain servers, and finally to the thousands of recursive resolvers operated by internet service providers and mobile carriers around the world. This propagation can take anywhere from a few hours to 48 hours to complete globally, though most modern DNS infrastructure completes the process within 4 to 12 hours for the majority of users. During this window, some visitors may see your old site (or an error page) while others already see your new site — a temporary inconsistency that is completely normal and resolves itself without any further action on your part.

Setting Up Your Free SSL Certificate Immediately

One of the most critical actions to take within the first 24 hours is enabling your free SSL certificate, which encrypts the connection between your server and your visitors' browsers and displays the reassuring padlock icon in the address bar. Modern browsers flag any site served over plain HTTP with a prominent Not Secure warning that greets visitors before they even see your content, and Google uses HTTPS as a confirmed ranking signal in its search algorithm — meaning an unsecured site suffers both a trust deficit and a visibility penalty from the moment it launches. In 2026, virtually every reputable hosting control panel includes an AutoSSL feature powered by Let's Encrypt or a similar certificate authority, and enabling it typically requires nothing more than clicking a single toggle switch in the security section of your dashboard. Some providers even activate AutoSSL by default during account provisioning, but you should always verify that the certificate is active by visiting your temporary URL with https:// in the address bar and confirming that no security warnings appear. Taking care of SSL on day one means you never have to worry about a friend, customer, or potential employer encountering a frightening browser warning when they visit your site — a detail that sounds small but has torpedoed the credibility of far too many first-time site owners who overlooked it until someone brought the problem to their attention.

Week 1: Installing WordPress, Choosing a Theme, and Setting Up SSL

Installing WordPress Through Your Control Panel

The vast majority of beginners build their websites using a content management system rather than hand-coding HTML files, and WordPress powers over 40 percent of all websites on the internet for good reason: it strikes a nearly perfect balance between flexibility and ease of use. Installing WordPress on your hosting account in 2026 is dramatically simpler than it was even five years ago, thanks to the one-click application installers integrated into every major hosting control panel. When you log into cPanel, DirectAdmin, or your provider's proprietary dashboard, look for an icon labeled Softaculous, Installatron, or WordPress Installer — clicking it opens a short form asking for your site name, admin username, and a strong password. The installer handles all the technical complexity automatically: it creates a MySQL or MariaDB database with properly randomized table prefixes, configures a database user with precisely the permissions it needs, downloads and extracts the latest WordPress core files, and runs the initial configuration wizard, all in under two minutes. Once the installation completes, your immediate next steps should be logging into your WordPress dashboard at yourdomain.com/wp-admin, navigating to the Updates page to confirm you are running the latest version, and deleting any default sample pages, posts, or comments that the installer created automatically. These small housekeeping actions establish a clean foundation that makes the rest of your 30-day journey far more straightforward than it would be if you left placeholder content cluttering your site.

Selecting a Theme That Balances Design and Performance

Your WordPress theme controls the visual design of your entire site — its layout, typography, color scheme, and responsive behavior across desktop and mobile devices — but it also significantly impacts your site's loading speed, search engine performance, and long-term maintainability. The WordPress theme directory offers thousands of free themes that have passed a rigorous review process, and for beginners who are not yet ready to invest in a premium theme, starting with a lightweight, well-maintained free option like GeneratePress, Kadence, or the official WordPress block themes is a strategy that avoids the most common performance pitfalls. The mistake I see beginners make most frequently is choosing a multipurpose theme that bundles sliders, page builders, portfolio modules, and dozens of other features they will never actually use — each of which adds JavaScript files, CSS stylesheets, and database queries that slow down every single page load. Before committing to any theme, install it on your site, run a quick performance test using a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix, and check whether the theme adds more than a handful of HTTP requests to your otherwise bare installation. A theme that loads in under one second with minimal additional assets sets you up for success during the performance optimization work you will tackle in Week 4, while a bloated theme will fight you every step of the way. For a broader understanding of how your hosting infrastructure itself affects performance choices like this, our guide to what web hosting is covers the server-side factors that interact with your theme selection.

SSL Configuration and HTTPS Enforcement

While your hosting-level SSL certificate encrypts the connection between visitors and your server, you still need to configure WordPress itself to serve all content over HTTPS consistently. After verifying that your SSL certificate is active at the server level, log into your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Settings, and update both your WordPress Address and Site Address fields from http:// to https:// — a change that tells WordPress to generate all internal links, asset URLs, and redirects using the secure protocol. Without this change, your site may load over HTTPS but reference images, stylesheets, and JavaScript files over HTTP, creating a mixed content condition that browsers handle by either blocking the insecure assets entirely or displaying a partially secure warning that undermines the trust you are trying to build. Many hosting providers include a Force HTTPS option in their control panel that adds server-level redirect rules automatically, but the WordPress URL settings remain the single most important configuration change you can make. After updating both URLs, browse your entire site — every page, every blog post, every image — and check that the padlock icon appears without warnings of any kind. This thorough verification early in your first week prevents the frustrating scenario of discovering mixed content issues weeks later when a visitor or client points them out.

Week 2: Creating Essential Pages, SEO Plugins, and Analytics

Building Your Site's Core Pages Before Anything Else

During your second week, the focus shifts from infrastructure setup to content creation, and the most productive approach begins with building the five essential pages that every website needs regardless of its niche or purpose. Start with your Homepage, which should clearly communicate what your site offers within five seconds of a visitor arriving — a concise headline, a supporting sentence, and a clear next action whether that is reading a blog post, contacting you, or browsing products. Next, create your About page, which research consistently shows is one of the most frequently visited pages on any website and an opportunity to establish the experience, authority, and trustworthiness that Google's E-E-A-T guidelines emphasize. Your Contact page should include at minimum a working contact form, your physical or mailing address if applicable, and links to any social media profiles where visitors can reach you. A Privacy Policy page is not optional — it is legally required in most jurisdictions and demanded by advertising platforms like Google AdSense, affiliate networks, and analytics services that need to demonstrate compliance with data protection regulations. Finally, a Blog or Resources landing page serves as the hub for the content you will publish going forward and signals to search engines that your site is actively maintained rather than abandoned. Each of these pages should be created with deliberate attention to title tags and meta descriptions even before you install an SEO plugin, because well-structured content pages outperform poorly structured ones even with the best optimization tools in the world layered on top of them.

Configuring an SEO Plugin for Maximum Discoverability

WordPress itself handles basic search engine optimization adequately, but installing a dedicated SEO plugin unlocks capabilities that transform your site from merely crawlable to genuinely optimized for ranking in Google and Bing search results. The two dominant players in 2026 remain Yoast SEO and Rank Math, both of which provide XML sitemap generation, title and meta description templates, Open Graph metadata for social media sharing, schema markup for rich results, and content analysis that flags readability and keyword usage issues as you write. After installing your chosen plugin, the first configuration task is generating an XML sitemap and submitting its URL to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools — a step that directly notifies search engines about every page on your site and dramatically accelerates the indexing process compared to waiting for crawlers to discover your content organically. Next, configure your global title and meta description templates so that every page and post automatically receives well-formatted search snippets even if you never manually set them, and verify that your site's search appearance looks correct by using the plugin's preview tool. The plugin will also identify technical SEO issues like missing alt text on images, excessively long or short meta descriptions, and orphaned pages that have no internal links pointing to them — issues that individually seem minor but collectively degrade your site's ability to rank for the keywords that matter to your business. For beginners who are still wrapping their heads around the connection between their hosting environment and their search visibility, our guide to hosting redundancy explains how server uptime and reliability directly affect the search engine crawl budget allocated to your site.

Installing Analytics Before You Need the Data

Setting up website analytics during your second week — before you have meaningful traffic to analyze — might feel premature, but it establishes a baseline of data that becomes invaluable the moment visitors start arriving. Google Analytics remains the industry standard for free, comprehensive website measurement, though privacy-focused alternatives like Plausible and Fathom have grown significantly in popularity as regulations like GDPR and CCPA reshape expectations around user tracking. Installing Google Analytics on WordPress is straightforward: most SEO plugins include a dedicated field where you paste your measurement ID, or you can use a dedicated plugin like Site Kit by Google that handles the integration and also surfaces key metrics directly inside your WordPress dashboard. Once analytics is active, the most important configuration is setting up conversion tracking for the specific actions that matter to your site — form submissions, newsletter signups, product purchases, or phone call clicks — because measuring traffic volume without measuring outcomes tells you almost nothing about whether your site is actually working. Create an annotation in your analytics account marking your official launch date so that future you, looking back at traffic charts months from now, can distinguish between the pre-launch testing period and the beginning of real visitor activity. Analytics data compounds in value over time, and starting the collection process during Week 2 means that by the end of your first 30 days you will have enough data to begin identifying which pages attract visitors, where those visitors come from, and how long they stay — insights that guide every content and marketing decision you will make going forward.

Week 3: Email Setup, Backup Configuration, and Security Hardening

Creating Professional Email Addresses at Your Domain

Using a free email address like yourname@gmail.com or yourbusiness@yahoo.com immediately signals to customers, clients, and partners that you are operating at a hobbyist level rather than running a serious professional operation, which is why setting up domain-based email should happen during your third week at the latest. Most hosting plans include email hosting that allows you to create addresses like info@yourdomain.com, support@yourdomain.com, or yourname@yourdomain.com through your control panel's email management interface, which typically provides IMAP, POP3, and SMTP access along with webmail for browser-based access. After creating your email accounts, the most important configuration step is setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records in your DNS zone — three authentication mechanisms that prove to receiving mail servers that emails sent from your domain are genuinely authorized and not forged by spammers. Without these records, your outgoing emails are significantly more likely to land in recipients' spam folders or be rejected entirely by major providers like Gmail and Outlook, a problem that is particularly acute on shared hosting where your mail server's sending IP reputation is influenced by the behavior of every other customer on the same server. Your hosting provider's documentation or support team can provide the exact DNS record values you need to add, and many modern control panels now include an Email Deliverability tool that checks, configures, and validates all three authentication mechanisms automatically — a feature worth seeking out when comparing hosting plans. For a deeper understanding of the infrastructure decisions that affect email reliability, our shared hosting guide for beginners covers how email performance varies across different hosting models.

Implementing Automated Backup Systems

The single most catastrophic mistake a website owner can make is failing to implement automated backups before something goes wrong, because by the time you realize you need a backup, it is already too late to create one. Modern hosting providers typically include some form of automated backup — often daily snapshots retained for 7 to 30 days — but you should never rely exclusively on your host's backups because they are stored on the same infrastructure as your live site and can be lost simultaneously in the event of a major hardware failure, data center incident, or account compromise. The gold standard for WordPress backup protection is a layered approach: your host's daily backups as the first line of defense, a WordPress backup plugin like UpdraftPlus, BlogVault, or Jetpack Backups that stores encrypted copies to a cloud destination like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Amazon S3, and a manual full-site backup that you generate and download before making any major changes like updating WordPress core, switching themes, or installing a batch of new plugins. During Week 3, install your chosen backup plugin, configure it to run automatic daily backups with at least 30 days of retention, verify that the remote storage destination is receiving files correctly by running a test backup and confirming the files appear at the cloud location, and then perform a test restoration to a staging environment or subdirectory so you know the recovery process works before you ever actually need it. This hour of configuration work during your third week could save you weeks of reconstruction work down the line, and in fifteen years of managing hosting infrastructure, I have never once heard a site owner say they regretted having too many backups.

Security Hardening Measures Every Beginner Should Implement

WordPress's popularity makes it a constant target for automated attacks — bots relentlessly scan the internet for sites running outdated software, weak passwords, or known vulnerable plugins, and a freshly launched site with default settings is precisely the kind of low-hanging fruit these attackers seek out. The good news is that a handful of straightforward security measures, implemented during your third week, raise the barrier to entry high enough that automated attacks simply move on to easier targets. Start by changing your WordPress admin username away from the default admin that many installers create, and ensure your password is a strong, randomly generated string of at least 16 characters stored in a password manager rather than anything memorable. Install a security plugin like Wordfence or Solid Security that provides a web application firewall, login attempt limiting that locks out IP addresses after a configurable number of failed attempts, file integrity monitoring that alerts you when core WordPress files are modified unexpectedly, and malware scanning that detects compromised files before they can serve malicious content. Configure automatic updates for WordPress core, plugins, and themes — a setting available in the WordPress dashboard updates screen that ensures security patches are applied within hours of release rather than days, weeks, or never. Finally, disable XML-RPC if you do not specifically need it for remote publishing or mobile app access, because it is a frequent vector for brute-force amplification attacks that can overwhelm even generously provisioned shared hosting accounts. Understanding the consequences of security failures is powerful motivation for taking these steps seriously, and our guide to hosting account suspensions explains exactly what happens when a compromised site forces your provider to take your entire account offline.

Week 4: Performance Optimization, Caching, and Image Compression

Configuring Server-Level and Plugin-Based Caching

Caching is the single most impactful performance optimization available to beginners, and it works by storing fully rendered copies of your pages so that the server does not need to execute PHP, query the database, and assemble the HTML from scratch for every single visitor request. Your hosting environment likely already includes some form of server-level caching — LiteSpeed Cache if your host runs LiteSpeed Web Server, or Nginx FastCGI cache if you are on an Nginx-based stack — and this operates below the WordPress level to serve cached pages with near-zero processing overhead. Within WordPress, installing a caching plugin like WP Rocket (premium), W3 Total Cache (free with a steep learning curve), or LiteSpeed Cache (free and deeply integrated if your host uses LiteSpeed) adds browser caching headers that tell visitors' browsers to store static assets locally, page caching that generates static HTML files, database caching that reduces query load, and object caching via Redis or Memcached that stores frequently accessed data in memory for sub-millisecond retrieval. Configure your caching plugin during Week 4 by enabling page caching and browser caching at minimum, setting the cache lifespan to a reasonable value like 10 hours for most content with a shorter duration for frequently updated pages, and enabling cache preloading so that popular pages are always served from cache rather than being generated on the first visitor request after expiration. Test your configuration thoroughly by running your site through a performance measurement tool before and after enabling each caching layer, confirming that page load times have improved and that no visual or functional issues have been introduced by overly aggressive caching of dynamic content. For sites that expect traffic from around the world, integrating a CDN like Cloudflare — which has a generous free tier — adds geographic caching that stores copies of your static files at data centers near your visitors, reducing latency for international audiences by hundreds of milliseconds.

Image Optimization Workflow for Faster Page Loads

Images typically account for the largest portion of a web page's total download size, often exceeding 60 to 80 percent of the total bytes transferred, which means that optimizing your images produces the single largest performance gain per minute of effort invested. The optimization process has three components: resizing images to the actual display dimensions before uploading them (serving a 4000-pixel-wide photograph in a 800-pixel-wide content area wastes bandwidth), compressing the file using modern formats like WebP or AVIF that deliver equivalent visual quality at a fraction of the file size of JPEG or PNG, and implementing lazy loading that defers the loading of images below the fold until the visitor scrolls near them. WordPress includes native lazy loading by adding the loading=lazy attribute to image and iframe tags automatically as of version 5.5, but image compression and format conversion require a plugin like ShortPixel, Imagify, or the free EWWW Image Optimizer, which can process your entire existing media library in bulk and automatically optimize new images as they are uploaded. During Week 4, install an image optimization plugin, run it against your existing media library to compress everything you have already uploaded, configure automatic optimization for future uploads, and enable WebP conversion if your hosting environment supports it and your visitors' browser share justifies it (which, as of 2026, it overwhelmingly does). The result of this work is a website whose pages load two to five times faster than they did before optimization, consuming less of your hosting bandwidth allocation and providing a dramatically better experience for visitors on mobile connections where every kilobyte matters.

Database Cleanup and Ongoing Maintenance Automation

WordPress stores everything — posts, pages, revisions, drafts, spam comments, transient options, and plugin settings — in its MySQL or MariaDB database, and over time that database accumulates bloat that increases query execution time and inflates backup file sizes without adding any value to your site. A freshly installed WordPress site might have a database under 10 MB, but after a month of writing posts with multiple revisions, testing themes and plugins, and accumulating spam comments and transient data, that same database can balloon past 100 MB with no corresponding increase in actual visitor-facing content. During Week 4, install a database optimization plugin like WP-Optimize or Advanced Database Cleaner, which provides a safe interface for removing post revisions, deleting spam and trashed comments, clearing expired transients, and optimizing database tables by reclaiming unused space. Configure the plugin to run these cleanups automatically on a weekly schedule so that you never need to think about database maintenance again — it simply happens in the background, keeping your site lean and your backups compact. Additionally, review your installed plugins and delete any that you installed during earlier weeks to test and then decided not to use, because even deactivated plugins add entries to your database and represent potential security vulnerabilities if they are not kept updated. The combination of automated database optimization and regular plugin auditing establishes maintenance habits that compound in value as your site ages, preventing the kind of gradual performance degradation that eventually forces site owners into expensive emergency cleanups or premature hosting plan upgrades that they do not actually need.

Ongoing Maintenance Habits to Build from Day One

The Weekly Routine That Prevents Catastrophic Surprises

By the end of your first 30 days, you should have established a weekly maintenance routine that takes no more than 30 minutes but prevents the vast majority of website emergencies that consume hours or days of recovery effort when left unaddressed. The routine begins with logging into your WordPress dashboard and checking the Updates screen: apply any pending updates for WordPress core, plugins, and themes, and if a major update is available, generate a fresh manual backup before clicking the update button so you have a rollback point if compatibility issues arise. Next, browse your site as a visitor would — click through your main navigation links, test your contact form by submitting a test message, verify that your SSL certificate is still displaying the padlock icon on every page, and confirm that your site loads correctly on a mobile device. Check your analytics dashboard to see how your traffic performed over the past week, looking specifically for any sudden drops that might indicate a technical problem, a search ranking change, or an expired domain configuration. Finally, scan your security plugin's dashboard for any alerts about failed login attempts, malware detections, or file modifications that you did not initiate, because catching a security incident in its first week is the difference between a five-minute fix and a multi-hour restoration from backup. This weekly cadence transforms website maintenance from an intimidating unknown into a predictable habit, and the beginners who adopt it during their first month consistently report far fewer panicked late-night calls to hosting support than those who check on their sites only when something visibly breaks.

Content Publishing Discipline and Editorial Calendar

A website that never publishes new content after its initial launch communicates to both visitors and search engines that the project has been abandoned, which is why establishing a publishing discipline during your first month creates momentum that carries forward indefinitely. The specific cadence depends on your goals and available time — a small business might publish one in-depth article per week, while a personal blog might post twice weekly and a news-focused site might publish daily — but the consistency matters far more than the volume. During Week 4, create a simple editorial calendar using a spreadsheet, a WordPress editorial calendar plugin, or a project management tool like Trello or Notion, and plan at least eight to twelve topics you want to cover in the two to three months following your launch. Each topic entry should include the target keyword phrase you want to rank for, the internal links you intend to include to your existing pages, and at least one external link to a reputable source that supports the authority of your content — a linking practice that Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines explicitly associate with high-quality pages. Before publishing any piece, run it through the content analysis tool in your SEO plugin, ensure it includes descriptive alt text on every image, and confirm that your target keyword appears naturally in the title, first paragraph, at least one heading, and the meta description. This upfront planning eliminates the blank-page paralysis that causes so many sites to languish after their initial burst of launch energy fades, transforming content creation from an inspirational activity into a systematic process that reliably builds authority and search traffic over time.

Monitoring Uptime and Performance with Free Tools

Your hosting provider's uptime guarantee is only as valuable as your ability to verify it, and setting up independent monitoring during your first month gives you objective data about whether your actual experience matches the promises made during the sales process. Free uptime monitoring services like UptimeRobot, Freshping, or HetrixTools check your site from multiple geographic locations at intervals ranging from one to five minutes and alert you via email, SMS, or mobile push notification the moment your site becomes unreachable. Configure at least one monitor pointed at your homepage during Week 4, and set the check interval to the shortest duration available on the free tier — typically five minutes — so that you can distinguish between brief transient blips and genuine outages that warrant contacting your hosting support team. Complement uptime monitoring with a performance monitoring tool like Google PageSpeed Insights, which you should run weekly against your homepage and your most important interior pages, tracking the scores over time in a simple spreadsheet so you can identify the exact moment a plugin update, theme change, or content addition degraded your site's speed. When you can correlate a performance drop to a specific change made within the same timeframe, the fix is usually straightforward to identify and reverse; when you lack that monitoring data, you are left guessing which of dozens of variables caused the problem, often wasting hours troubleshooting inconclusively. For a technical understanding of how hosting infrastructure decisions affect the uptime you can realistically expect, refer to our explanation of hosting redundancy and how it prevents the outages that independent monitoring tools are designed to catch.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the most important thing to know about hosting for beginners?

This guide covers the practical decision points — pricing, performance, and when it makes sense for your situation — based on current 2026 data. The hosting landscape evolves quickly, and what was true even two or three years ago may no longer reflect the reality of today's market, which is why staying informed with up-to-date resources like those published by Hosting Captain ensures you are making decisions based on the most current information available. The most important concept to internalize during your first 30 days is that hosting is not a set-it-and-forget-it purchase — it is the foundation upon which every aspect of your website depends, and the maintenance habits you establish during this first month directly determine how smoothly your site operates in the months and years that follow.

How much does this typically cost in 2026?

Pricing varies by provider and plan tier; see the cost breakdown section above for current ranges and what's actually included at each price point. Shared hosting plans suitable for beginners generally range from approximately $3 to $15 per month at renewal rates, VPS plans from roughly $20 to $80 per month depending on resource allocation and management level, and dedicated servers from about $100 to well over $500 per month for high-end configurations with premium support packages. The total cost of ownership extends beyond the monthly hosting fee alone: domain registration typically adds $10 to $20 per year, premium themes or plugins can add $50 to $200 annually, and any services not bundled into your plan — like premium backups, enhanced security scanning, or external email hosting — contribute additional costs that should be factored into your budget from the outset.

What should beginners check before making a decision?

Look closely at uptime guarantees, renewal pricing (not just the first-year discount), and how responsive support actually is — all covered in detail in this article. Uptime guarantees should specify both the percentage (typically 99.9 percent or higher) and the compensation mechanism — whether credits are applied automatically or require manual claim submission with documented evidence of downtime. Renewal pricing transparency is a strong signal of provider integrity; if the renewal rate is buried in fine print or requires a multi-year commitment to approach the advertised introductory price, that pattern warrants caution and further investigation. Support responsiveness can be evaluated before purchase by sending a pre-sales question through the provider's ticketing system or live chat and measuring the response time and quality — a provider that takes 48 hours to answer a prospective customer's question will not magically become faster after they have your money. Beyond these three core factors, verify that the provider supports the specific PHP version your chosen CMS requires, check whether daily backups are included and how many restore points are retained, confirm that SSL certificates are provided at no additional cost, and review the acceptable use policy for vague language that could allow the provider to suspend your account for resource usage they deem excessive without providing clear, objective thresholds. For a thorough technical foundation before making your final decision, Mozilla's domain name documentation is an excellent resource that explains the domain system underpinning every hosting decision you will make.