Understanding Your Website Hosting Charge
Web Hosting Explained
Welcome to Northnet Media’s guide to understanding your website hosting service charge. We know that web hosting might seem complex, especially if you’re not familiar with tech jargon. This page will explain what web hosting is, why it’s essential and charged annually*, and the additional benefits included in your hosting fee.
* In some cases, if preferred, you can opt to be charged monthly instead. Otherwise, we’ll invoice this annually according to the month your website was first moved onto our hosting servers.
What is Web Hosting?
Every website active on the internet needs storage space on a web server. Web Servers are specialized computer systems that feed information to the internet. To put it simply, it is renting a space on a server which ensures your website is accessible to your customers 24/7.
Whereas there are free and cheap options available, they are often unreliable and easy to hack. That is why we’ve gone with the most secure and cost-effective option that makes sure your website stays online and cannot be easily tampered with.
Why is Hosting Charged Annually?
Web hosting involves ongoing services that require constant maintenance, security, and support. Whereas our company incurs these costs monthly, we charge you annually based on the amount of storage your site requires for the year. This way, we can also guarantee a seamless, uninterrupted service, ensuring your website remains online and efficient year-round.
In addition to the server-side features and benefits, extra essential yearly costs are automatically included in your hosting charge. See the list of benefits below to learn more about everything!
Benefits Included in Your Hosting:
Unlimited Online Storage: Your website can grow without space and performance constraints – ensuring fast loading times and the freedom to add more content. That is why we picked servers that cannot be overloaded and will serve sites of all sizes.
Daily Backups: We offer daily backups, so if there’s ever an issue, we can restore your site quickly, minimizing any disruption to your business. While rare for an issue to occur, the assurance that your website will be back to normal in mere minutes is a benefit that saves everyone time and headaches.
SSL Certificate: Every site we host has an SSL certificate, essential for security and building trust with your visitors. Sites that do not have SSL enabled are often blocked by firewalls and malware-detection security add-ons.
Domain Registration: Every website has at least one domain name tied to it, which is an additional yearly cost outside of web hosting. These range in price depending on the popularity of the name, but we make this simple by including it in your hosting charge. If you bought your domain name yourself, then we manage the DNS; which is also a support benefit included in your hosting fee.
Ongoing Support & Core Updates: Our team is always on hand to help with any questions or issues you might encounter. This is another added benefit we provide for being a hosting client. We take care of essential platform and security updates; note that these do not include plugin updates which are described below.
!NEW! Automatic Plugin Updates: All clients used to be responsible for either (1) logging into the backend of their website to manually push updates on included features, or (2) reaching out to request that our team review their website and push updates. These days are no more! At the beginning of 2023, the server services added this as an extra benefit – to which we provided a discount for clients who opted in. But starting in 2024, this is now an included feature on the plan which cannot be opted out of. The good news though is that you’ll never have to worry about any part of your site missing updates that could affect efficiency.