Guide 05 · The "hosted" in Sethhost, unpacked
Website hosting types, explained honestly — including the ones we don't sell
Sethhost's Hosted plan includes website hosting and care, so you should be able to judge that claim against the whole market. This guide explains every major hosting type in plain terms — shared, WordPress, VPS, dedicated, and managed build-and-care — what actually decides speed and safety, and where Sethhost's model fits and where it does not.
The five types, without the sales gloss
| Type | How it works | You are responsible for | Honest weakness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared hosting | Many sites on one server, splitting its processor, memory, and bandwidth. | Your site, its software, its updates, its backups. | A busy neighbour can slow your site; resource limits are tighter than the marketing suggests. |
| Managed WordPress hosting | Servers tuned for WordPress; the host handles core updates, caching, and backups. | Content, plugins, and the bill — priced well above shared hosting. | Only makes sense if your site runs WordPress. Irrelevant if it doesn't. |
| VPS (virtual private server) | A reserved slice of a server with guaranteed resources and full control. | On unmanaged plans: everything, including server security and updates. | Cheap unmanaged VPS plans quietly make you a system administrator. |
| Dedicated server | An entire physical machine for one customer. | Everything, unless you pay for management. | Far more capacity than a small business site will ever use. |
| Managed build-and-care (Sethhost's model) | Your site is built for you and hosted on a global platform (Cloudflare); updates and content changes are handled for you as part of a monthly plan. | Your content and your business decisions. | It is a business-presence site, not a platform: no app hosting, no custom server software, no do-it-yourself control panel. |
Speed: the three numbers that matter, and their real thresholds
Google measures real-visitor experience with Core Web Vitals, assessed at the 75th percentile of visits (three out of four visits must pass). The "good" thresholds, per Google's web.dev documentation:
| Metric | Measures | Good |
|---|---|---|
| LCP — Largest Contentful Paint | How fast the main content appears | 2.5 seconds or less |
| INP — Interaction to Next Paint | How fast the page reacts to a tap or click | 200 milliseconds or less |
| CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift | How much the page jumps around while loading | 0.1 or less |
Why this matters when choosing hosting: a small, static business site served from a global edge network starts with a structural advantage on all three — there is no database to wait for and no plugin stack to execute on every visit. A plugin-heavy WordPress install on crowded shared hosting can be made fast, but it takes continuous work. We publish no speed figure for Sethhost client sites; measure any live site yourself at pagespeed.web.dev, ours included.
Security, SSL, and the hacked-site problem
Most small-site compromises walk through the same doors: an outdated content-management system, an abandoned plugin, or a reused password on the admin login. A static site with no public login and no plugin stack removes those particular doors — that is an architectural statement, not a promise that nothing can ever go wrong. Separately: every site Sethhost launches is served over HTTPS, and under Hosted care the site being up and its certificate being valid are verified monthly. An SSL certificate encrypts traffic between your visitor and the site; it does not, by itself, make a site trustworthy or unhackable, and any host implying otherwise is overselling a padlock.
Email: the part "hosting" bundles quietly get wrong
Sethhost does not sell email hosting, and says so here because bundles elsewhere blur this. If your business email lands in spam, the cause is usually missing or broken authentication records — SPF (which servers may send for your domain), DKIM (a cryptographic signature on outgoing mail), and DMARC (what receivers should do with mail that fails the other two). Whoever hosts your email should set all three up with you and show you the records. Deliverability is configuration, not luck.
Migration, backups, and the exit question
Moving an existing site between hosts means moving files and any database, repointing DNS, re-issuing the HTTPS certificate, and preserving email records — a weekend of careful work, and a service Sethhost does not sell: a Launch website is a fresh five-page build (home, services, about, contact, one conversion page), live within 14 days of your completed content handoff. The more important question is the reverse one — can you leave? Under Sethhost's terms (§6), on exit your full site files are delivered to you on request, and your domain is your asset, transferable at any time. Ask every host that question before you sign up, and get the answer in the terms, not the brochure.
Uptime, explained the way we would want it explained to us
Hosts advertise uptime percentages; almost none publish the measurement behind them, and we publish no percentage at all. Here is what Hosted care actually commits to, from our operating runbook: if you report an outage, it is acknowledged the same business day, and the first checks are the platform status (Cloudflare) and our own deploy history. That is a smaller promise than a four-nines uptime slogan — and it is the true one.
What hosting really costs
Across the market, the traps are consistent: introductory prices that multiply at renewal, backups and SSL sold as add-ons, and "unlimited" plans with very limited fine print. Sethhost's structure is deliberately different — hosting and care are inside the published $79/month Hosted plan alongside registered agent service, mail handling, and the compliance calendar, with no separate hosting renewal — but the right way to compare is total cost of being online for three years, including the human time each model demands from you. On that arithmetic, the expensive option is usually the cheap plan plus your own weekends.
Sethhost is not a law firm and does not provide legal or tax advice. This guide is general information, not advice about your situation. Tax filings are performed by a qualified tax preparer engaged for that service or by your own CPA; legal questions go to your own attorney.
Reading is step one. The paperwork is the rest.
Sethhost handles formation paperwork, the EIN workflow, registered agent service, official mail handling, your website, a US number, and a compliance calendar — one company, one bill. Launch is $499 one-time; Hosted is $79 per month; the state filing fee is always shown separately.