Domain·Hosting
Updated for 2026

Domain Names and Web Hosting, Explained Straight

A domain name is the address people type; hosting is the computer that answers when they do. You need both, and they do not have to come from the same company. The tool below asks four questions and names the class of hosting that fits — no brands, no prices, no email address.

Four questions

Answer updates as you click
What are you putting online
Visits a month you expect in year one

A guess is fine. It only decides whether an entry plan has room, not what you pay.

How you feel about a terminal
What an unexpected bill would mean
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Closest fit

    Every class, ranked

      This is a category, not a company. Any host selling that category can serve you well or badly; the checks below are how you tell them apart.

      Before you pay, check these four things

        How the answer is worked out

        Two rules, applied in order

        First, what cannot work is removed. That part is not an opinion. A static host serves files from a CDN: it runs no PHP and has no database, so WordPress cannot live there. An application you wrote needs a process that stays running, which shared plans do not provide. Managed WordPress plans run WordPress and nothing else. The tool shows those eliminations struck out, with the reason, because the reason is the useful part.

        Then the survivors are ranked on your other three answers: how much traffic you expect, how much of a server you want to administer, and what an unexpected invoice would do to you. That last question moves the answer more than people expect. Usage-billed hosting — where you pay for bandwidth, builds or compute as you consume them — is cheap until something goes wrong, and the well-known billing-shock stories all involve a plan that could alert but not stop. If you told the tool a surprise bill is unacceptable, fixed-price classes move up.

        The one line worth taking away: before you deploy anything on a usage-billed plan, find out whether it can be capped — a limit that takes the site offline — or whether it can only send you an alert about a bill you have already run up.

        No company is named anywhere in the output, and no price is stored in the page. Every figure in the cost tool is one you type in from your own quote or invoice, because introductory prices, renewal prices and domain fees change constantly and a number baked into a web page is out of date the week after it is written.

        The full set

        Every guide and tool on this site

        Eight pages, each answering one question properly — the decision, the money, and the wiring that connects a name to a server.

        Built and maintained by Mustafa Bilgic · Independent — no host or registrar is named, ranked or recommended ·

        Sources

        • Server requirements for WordPress — the official requirements page at wordpress.org/about/requirements/ (version minimums are stated there and change between releases).
        • DNS resource record types A, CNAME, MX and TXT — RFC 1035, Domain Names: Implementation and Specification (IETF).
        • Every figure in the calculators on this site is typed in by you. No price, allowance or renewal rate is stored in the page.

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