Hosting
The service that stores your website files and makes them accessible on the internet. Traditional hosting relies on single servers that can be slow and require maintenance. Modern edge hosting platforms distribute your site across global networks for instant loading anywhere.
Traditional vs edge hosting
Traditional shared hosting places your site on a single server in one location. When visitors access your site, their browser connects to that server—whether it's next door or across the world. Distance creates latency. Server load creates slowdowns. You share resources with dozens of other sites.
Edge hosting distributes your site to hundreds of servers globally. Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, and Netlify serve your site from the location nearest each visitor. A request from London hits a London server. One from Sydney hits a Sydney server. This reduces latency from 500ms+ to under 50ms.
The hosting maintenance burden
WordPress hosting requires regular maintenance: server updates, PHP version management, database optimisation, backup verification, and security monitoring. Premium managed WordPress hosts handle this but charge £15-50 monthly. Budget hosts leave you managing everything.
Modern static hosting has no servers to maintain. Astro sites compile to HTML files that just... work. No PHP updates, no database tuning, no security patches. Deploy once, serve forever. Most edge hosts offer generous free tiers since serving static files costs them nearly nothing.
What managed hosting actually means
All Fernside sites include managed hosting—we handle uptime monitoring, SSL certificates, performance optimisation, and technical troubleshooting. You never think about servers, CDN configuration, or cache invalidation. It just works.
This differs from "managed WordPress hosting" where you still handle content, plugins, and updates. Our managed hosting means genuinely hands-off infrastructure. Your only responsibility: creating great content.
Hosting costs and scaling
Traditional hosting costs rise with traffic. Exceed your plan's bandwidth or visitor limits, and you pay overage fees or suffer throttling. Growing traffic means upgrading hosting tiers—another monthly cost increase.
Edge hosting scales effortlessly. Cloudflare Pages serves sites with millions of monthly visitors at no additional cost. No traffic limits, no bandwidth caps, no surprise charges. Your hosting costs stay flat while your traffic grows.
Related terms
Why it matters
Understanding “Hosting” helps you speak the same language as our design and development team. If you need help applying it to your project, book a Fernside call.