Buyer's Guide
News Site Hosting — what really decides it
Written for local and specialist news publishers with newsroom rhythms and sudden traffic spikes — the tests that matter, the trap to sidestep, and where we would honestly send you.
Straight answer first
If you read one paragraph only, the right pick is cached WordPress on Elite-tier resources — the big-story day is the whole business model, so the hosting has to treat it as an ordinary Tuesday.
The reasoning, the tests and the trap to avoid all sit below — written for local and specialist news publishers with newsroom rhythms and sudden traffic spikes, with none of the affiliate-table theatre this subject usually attracts.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
NVMe
Storage in every plan
Free
Domain, year one
99.9%
Uptime commitment held
Flat
Price at renewal
This guide is written for local and specialist news publishers with newsroom rhythms and sudden traffic spikes. If that describes you, the decision has a right answer — it just is not the one the comparison-table trade is paid to hand out.
Traffic to a news site arrives in violent bursts. A local story picked up regionally can multiply the day's numbers a hundredfold within hours, and nearly all of it is cacheable pageviews. Keep that in view and most of the noise in this market sorts itself into signal.
How to weigh up the options
Hold every candidate against these, in this order:
A cache built for the surge a breaking story brings.
Several journalists in the admin at once, all working at the same moment.
An archive that keeps swelling as the years of coverage add up.
Uptime you can stand behind, because a news site that is down has nothing to say.
Read this before you compare price tags
Sizing the plan for average traffic in a trade defined by its exceptional days; news traffic is a series of spikes with a baseline underneath.
The pattern lasts because its cost lands later: at renewal, at migration, or at the worst possible point in your growth. The antidote is dull arithmetic — total cost across two or three years, with every 'extra' you would actually need added in.
The verdict, plainly
Cached WordPress on Elite-tier resources — the big-story day is the whole business model, so the hosting has to treat it as an ordinary Tuesday.
On our shelves that means the Elite WordPress plan — SSL, migration and mail included, a renewal price matching the order price, and an upgrade path so the choice never has to be made again from scratch.
Order an annual plan and the first year of your domain registration is on the house.
Try it before you trust it
Run the same checks on us as on anybody else: message support before you pay and see who answers, hold the renewal price against the order price, read the refund terms end to end, and look the company up — ours is Bohzo Ltd, registered in England and Wales, and the record is public.
The refund window covers the rest — move a real site across (the free migration makes that painless), live with it for a fortnight, and let daily use settle what no marketing page can.
No affiliate table, no ranking fee
We are a host recommending hosting, and we say it plainly. No pretend neutrality, no league table paid for by referral fees. The trade is openness for trust, and it reads better besides.
What you pay on day one is what you pay at renewal, so the year-two invoice holds no surprises worth opening early.
- Tests you can run for yourself
- Renewal prices on the tag, not in a footnote
- The free move in makes trying us painless
- A refund policy with no small print
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Support you can try first
Ask us something hard before you pay — how a host behaves pre-sale is the ceiling of what follows.
Written for the real buyer
The tests here come out of actual conversations with local and specialist news publishers with newsroom rhythms and sudden traffic spikes, not off a feature spreadsheet.
A real ladder to climb
Shared, VPS and dedicated all under one roof — today's choice never boxes you in tomorrow.
A company you can look up
Bohzo Ltd, registered in England and Wales — a host with a public record you can read before trusting.
A refund without a gauntlet
If it does not suit, leaving is a request rather than a negotiation — which is why we are content to be tested.
One price, plainly printed
The order price is the renewal price — the comparison that matters is the one we win without trying.
Price Tags Compared
Our figures beside the big names
Sign-up and renewal prices for GoDaddy, Hostinger and Namecheap, set next to ours — the second number most comparison charts leave off.
| Line item | Hosting SellerBest seller | GoDaddy | Hostinger | Namecheap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price / mo* | $2.09/mo | $5.99 | $2.99 | $1.88 |
| Price at renewal / mo | $2.09/mo | $11.99 | $10.99 | $4.29 |
| Entry plan renews at the same price | ||||
| SSL on every plan | ||||
| Site migration included | ||||
| NVMe storage on the entry plan | ||||
| Daily backups on the entry plan | ||||
| Live human support, 24/7 |
*Our figure is the cheapest plan we sell, on an annual term. The competitor figures are the lowest shared-hosting price each of them published in July 2026 — those introductory rates normally require signing up for 1–4 years and rise once that term ends. Check their own sites for what they charge today.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Write the requirement in one sentence
Put down what the site has to do and for whom — for local and specialist news publishers with newsroom rhythms and sudden traffic spikes, that one sentence usually settles half the plan choice by itself.
- 2
Price the second year, not the first
Multiply the renewal price by the term and add every extra you would genuinely need — the cheapest headline rarely survives that sum.
- 3
Try it inside the refund window
Order, move a real site across free, and use it properly for a fortnight — the daily experience is the product, and the window makes trying it cost nothing.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- The Softaculous installer for one-click application setup
- Spam and virus filtering fitted to every mailbox
- WebP image optimisation built in and costing nothing
- cPanel, the panel the rest of the trade already knows
- SSH, Git and Composer on the plans built for developers
- Site migration done for you by our staff, at no charge
- A 30-day money-back guarantee on every hosting plan
- DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge
- Mailboxes that carry your own domain name
- NVMe SSD storage on every shelf, not just the top one
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
What happens to the hosting when a story takes off?
The page cache serves the rush as stored copies, so the spike turns into bandwidth rather than computation. What is left uncached — search, comments, admin — stays small. Architecture absorbs the big day, not panic.
And what about the newsroom while all that is happening?
Editors work outside the cache, so the admin depends on PHP workers and database speed. NVMe and object caching keep publishing fluid even mid-surge, because the next story has to go out while the traffic is peaking.
Can I test changes somewhere safe first?
Yes — plans with staging let you clone the live site, work on the copy, then push it across when you are satisfied. It is the difference between hoping an update behaves and knowing that it does before any customer meets it.
Is the SSL certificate genuinely free?
On every plan, with nothing held back. The certificate is issued the moment your domain points here and reissues itself well before expiry. The encryption is the same as a paid DV certificate — paid tiers exist only for wildcard coverage or organisation validation, which most sites never need.
Can I bring a domain I already own?
Yes, and transfers in are routine. Unlock the name at your present registrar, collect the auth code, then start the transfer from your client area. Whatever registration time is left comes across with it, and DNS keeps answering the whole way through.
Where do the servers actually sit?
Our hosting runs from European datacentres with London at the centre, behind server-level caching that keeps cached pages quick for visitors anywhere. For most sites the build of the platform — NVMe disks, LiteSpeed, sensible numbers of accounts per machine — decides the speed far more than the postcode does.
What does round-the-clock support actually stretch to?
People at the counter at every hour, and a scope that takes in the practical work: mailbox setup, DNS records, WordPress trouble, restores. Not 'the server responds, ticket closed'. Ask us something hard before you order — the reply is a fair sample of what you would get afterwards.
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A plain running order for a move nobody notices: what to copy first, how to carry email across without dropping a single message, when to point DNS, and the two slips behind nearly every hour of downtime we get called about.
Do the launch properly this time.
Quick NVMe hosting, SSL and the move in included, and real people on the counter at any hour — on a price that doesn't shift.
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