Let’s have a look at hosting a website, as per 2025.

The Gist

Ah, web hosting. From DIY to managed, to hand-holding at the extreme.

All very much viable options of course, but which is the best idea for your particular master plan? Well, dear reader, that’s what we aim to have a look at in this article.

We’ll start with the most cushioned and limited approaches, head over to the more traditional approaches, before landing at the modern and ‘big business’ approaches. You might like to know, that it is in fact entirely possible to host a website for free these days. No-no-no, not riddled with ads and banners and whatnot… Actual, proper hosting. At quite the massive scale.

Won’t you join us, and have a look?

We’ll throw in a bit of ‘just want to blog’, for good measure.

Website ‘Builders’

Popular among many these days are ‘Website Builders’ such as Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, and Webflow. These platforms offer a ‘drag-and-drop’ or ‘what-you-see-is-what-you-get’ approach to building a website. They come with all manner of add-ons, templates, and whatnot. Shopping, questionnaires, and the like—all included.

They offer a free tier, of course, but let’s be honest: that’s for demoing the platform. Without a nice domain such as ‘biscuits.com’ of your own, there’s not much chance of achieving much of anything these days. Unless it’s blogging that we’re after. In that case there are always always platforms such as Medium or Substack. More on that in the ‘blogging platforms’ section.

A paid tier it is then. About 12 to 20 Western coins and up per month for an entry-level tier. This will include a domain name, basic e-commerce features and more.

There’s no denying that platforms such as these offer the lowest barrier to entry. No coding skills required, a lot of guidance provided. A fair option for the budding entrepreneur.

Any large companies, opting for this route? No, and there’s quite a few reasons for that. No worries, we’ll keep it as short and sweet as we’re able, dear reader.

Control / Flexibility

The strength of platforms such as these, is also its drawback—lack of control. The website isn’t actually owned, it is part of a fully integrated service. It is possible to import and export data, but the site itself cannot be moved elsewhere.

In other words, there is little room for modularity, although it has improved over the years. There is some room for adding custom functionality, but it is limited compared to the other options mentioned in this article.

Cost

Ease of use does come with a price tag, and compared to DIY solutions, these platforms are simply more expensive. It’s easier to get started, but it comes at a cost, and true scalability and customisability are out of reach.

Efficiency

In terms of efficiency at runtime, these platforms don’t meet our standards. They are heavily dependent on database interactions, and dynamic generation of content. This leads to a slower user experience, and unnecessary power consumption.

Blogging Platforms

For people who are just interested in blogging and want nothing to do whatsoever with any technical elements, there are dedicated blogging platforms. Medium, Substack, Blogger, and Memberful being the most popular commercial candidates. For more privacy-focused bloggers, there is writefreely.

The business model here is either to establish a walled garden for paying subscribers and distribute a portion of the proceeds to writers (Medium), to establish an individual walled garden (Substack, Memberful), or to generate revenue through managed advertising (Blogger).

Control / Flexibility

Blogging platforms offer even less control than website builders, not only in terms of customisation, but also monetisation. The degree to which content is discoverable is largely in the hands of the platform in question, and with it—so is much of the income stream.

Cost

Cost is primarily covered by either by the platform taking a share of the profits, or by paying a relatively modest subscription fee.

Efficiency

As with the previous category, these platforms are strongly database and code-driven. Meaning the platform will either take a larger share, or pay out less, as hardware and energy requirements will need to be recouped by the platform.

Managed Hosting

The ’traditional approach’, well for the last 20 years or so at least. As such, just about every hosting provider under the sun offers such a package. Originally it meant that a hosting provider would take care of all the pains in managing popular platforms such as WordPress.org, Drupal, Joomla among others, on behalf of their customers.

It can still very much mean that today, but there is significant competition from the creators of these platforms. The latter have taken it upon themselves to SaaS their solutions. Think WordPress.com, Ghost and others. Read the SaaS section of our cloud computing explained article for a better view of that tidbit.

On the whole these platforms are mature, feature excellent workflow and collaboration tools and a great deal of extensibility. But in terms of going global, they are quite limited—which may very well come back to bite a large site in the seating device.

Control / Flexibility

Very high. In the right hands almost anything can be tweaked, and modified. There’s full control of user data, a rich ecosystem to draw from, and both the site and its data are relatively easy to migrate.

However, note the absence of optimisation, as these platforms are entirely designed with developer efficiency in mind. Virtually no focus on runtime efficiency whatsoever.

Cost

For small blogs, actually cheaper than the ‘website builders’ mentioned earlier. Add e-commerce, however, or a large number of visitors, and that begins to change. Such is the cost of flexibility.

Efficiency

In their default form: ghastly. We’d wager to say that the options offered by the platform creators are likely somewhat more efficient, but no doubt within a fairly limited scope.

It is becoming increasingly common to transform these platforms into content management systems and static site generators, but that doesn’t change inherent flaws. Read our articles on the pros and cons of static websites for a clearer picture on that.

Spoiler: if you’re going to go static, do it properly, don’t Frankenstein a dated platform with inherent flaws.

Static Hosting

Finally, we get to the good part!

Biased, much?

Oh yes, but in your favour, dear reader. Right, where were we, ah yes, ‘static hosting’.

This is where things quite literally get free of charge for all but the ‘biscuits.com’ or domain part of the equation. Practically no maintenance, no security issues, and performance that—if done right—is at SciFi levels. If not done right, still pretty spiffing, but slightly less efficient.

In this scenario the core of our website is reduced to a set of files. The bulk of our e-commerce—the product pages as well—if we play our cards right. This is what servers and networks excel at: sending files. Never mind complex messages, and all that malarkey. Just send me that puppy picture pronto!

Because of that, there are quite a few platforms willing to host your files for free. They probably feel that it makes them look good. To be fair, it rather does. Codeberg, Gitlab, Github are among the prime candidates, by order of efficiency and / or ethics. All we need to do after that is to hook it up to a content delivery network such as Cloudflare. This will ensure that our site’s files are copied around the world, and delivered to our visitors from a location nearest to them.

We are in the process of writing a series of guides on how to implement all that dear reader, bear with us while we tickle that with a feather duster.

Control / Flexibility

Very high. Complete modularity, but more complex. We will address that bit though, dear reader, oh yes. In the very near future.

Cost

For the core website, literally nothing besides the cost of domain ownership. Additional functionality such as accepting payments, chat and the like will need to be either self-hosted or subscribed to separately.

Efficiency

Runtime: maximum. Developer: similar to other platforms as it requires knowledge of templating, formatting and the like.

Do-It-Yourself

There are however still a few more options to have a gander at, dear reader. The DIY department. We can host our own static site, or dynamic site, or dynamic components on a server of our own. We can also do a bit of a combo with the previous category, or even host the static part of our site on an object storage solution.

We won’t get into the technical details of all that in this article, as it’s not a technical tutorial, but we will briefly discuss our options.

By splitting our site across even more optimised solutions, such as object storage for scripts, styles, media, and an HTTP server for HTML we can achieve even higher performance. This makes achieving true global scale possible, and more customisable than by using a Git service as mentioned earlier.

We hope to release a tutorial later this week that comes with a script that will automatically install a secure web server, running on a server for 5 coins a month or more. Stay tuned for that, dear reader, as it will feature an advanced yet automated setup.

Control / Flexibility

Maximum, this type of deployment allows us to modularise literally every component of our public site.

Cost

Starting at comparable prices to managed service, all the way up to the equivalent of buying an upmarket apartment each month. Fret not, by the time that becomes applicable, you’ll be making enough to cover the cost.

Efficiency

If done right, maximum. The details of that are beyond the scope of this article, but in a nutshell: if we manage to set up an infrastructure that scales from 0 to maximum and back, then there is no higher level of efficiency. That is fairly complex to set up however. Lucky you have us, dear reader, we’ll publish a guide for that before the year is out.

The Digerty

If you’re new to Digerty then—as our friends across the pond say—buckle up. If you’re already familiar with us, well then nice to meet you dear reader! So you’re the one!

So, what’s the Digerty then?

The broad impact on your digital liberty, dear reader. When we look at the difference between the enterprise approach v the personal or small to medium business approach, we immediately see a glaring difference. The smaller approach is particularly wasteful as it prioritises convenience over scale and cost management.

It can no longer be denied that using interpreted languages or environments such as PHP, Ruby, and node.js for large amounts of operations per second, is anything but efficient. Coupling that with database interactions for everything makes a bad problem, far worse.

While that is not without its historical reasons, it’s time to make a change. We need to make changes, so that the bulk of our internet interactions are simply moving files around. We need to limit database interactions to the absolute minimum. This will save electricity, allow us to do more with less hardware and thus allow us to achieve more, with less money.

If we make the right choices, the market will follow suit, and expand the options available to us. That’d be better for us all, wouldn’t you say?

The Takeaway

There we have it, dear reader, an overview of the web hosting landscape as per 2025. Delivered with our signature bias, but rooted in science fact, not fiction.

We hope you’ll check back to try out our upcoming guides on achieving the best of all this gibberywhatsit. See you then.

Yours,

Digerty