Web hosting is sold on price, which is exactly why so many small businesses end up on the wrong plan. The advertised number is almost never what you pay in year two, and the things that actually matter — where your data sits, whether backups work, whether anyone answers the phone — rarely appear on the pricing page at all.
Here is what to check, in the order it matters.
1. Where are the servers, physically?
This is first because it is a legal question, not a technical one. If your site stores customer information — names, emails, order history, anything a contact form collects — the country those records physically sit in determines which privacy law governs them.
Hosted in Canada, that is PIPEDA. Hosted in the United States, your Canadian customers' data falls under US jurisdiction regardless of where your business operates. For a lot of small businesses that is fine. For anyone handling health information, financial records or client confidential material, it is not a detail to leave to chance.
2. What does it cost on renewal?
The standard shared-hosting model is an introductory rate that roughly triples when the first term ends. $3.95/month becomes $12.95/month, and the discount usually only applies if you prepay two or three years up front.
It is not exactly hidden — it is in the terms — but it does mean comparing advertised prices tells you very little. Compare renewal rates instead. That is the price you will actually be paying for most of the relationship.
3. Is SSL included?
Every site needs HTTPS. Browsers flag pages without it, and Google has treated it as a ranking signal for years.
A TLS certificate costs nothing — Let's Encrypt has issued them free since 2016, and every competent host automates it. If a host is charging $60 a year for HTTPS, they are billing you for something that costs them nothing, and that tells you what the rest of the relationship looks like.
4. Are the backups real?
Look for daily automatic backups, at least 14 to 30 days of retention, and one-click restore. Then ask the question almost nobody asks: have you tested a restore?
A backup nobody has ever restored is not a backup, it is a hope. We have been called in to rescue sites where backups had been "running" for months and every one of them was unreadable. The moment you find that out is always the worst possible moment.
5. What does support actually look like?
Test it before you commit. Send a pre-sales question at 9pm on a Sunday and see what happens. Look for phone or live chat, not just a ticket form with a 48-hour response target — because when your site is down, 48 hours is a very long time.
Ask who you are actually talking to, too. First-line support at large hosts is often scripted, and getting past it to someone who can read a server log can take days.
6. Managed or unmanaged?
Unmanaged hosting means you handle updates, security patching, malware cleanup and troubleshooting. It is cheaper, and it is the right choice if you have someone technical who will genuinely do that work every month.
If you do not, managed hosting is worth the difference. The failure mode for unmanaged hosting at a small business is predictable: everything is fine for eight months, nobody applies the updates, and then a known vulnerability in an out-of-date plugin gets exploited.
Red flags worth walking away from
- Introductory pricing that triples on renewal, with the renewal rate buried.
- No clear statement of where the servers physically are.
- SSL charged as an extra.
- "Unlimited" storage or bandwidth — it never is; read the fair-use clause.
- Support only by email ticket, with no published response time.
- No export path. If you cannot take your site and data elsewhere, you do not control it.
A quick comparison
| What to check | Good answer | Walk away if |
|---|---|---|
| Server location | Named Canadian data centre, in writing | Vague |
| Renewal price | Same as the intro price | 2–3× intro |
| SSL | Included, auto-renewed | Charged extra |
| Backups | Daily, 30 days, restore-tested | "On request" |
| Support | Phone or live chat | Ticket only |
| Leaving | Full export provided | No export |
The honest summary
For most Canadian small businesses the right answer is managed hosting at roughly $20 to $60 a month, from a provider that will state its data centre location in writing, has restore-tested its backups, and puts a human on the phone. That is more than the $3.95 headline and considerably less than what that plan costs on renewal — and it removes an entire category of problem from your week.