Hosting

What it means

Hosting is renting the space and computing power a website, webshop or application runs on. From shared hosting through a virtual server to a dedicated machine, the differences are performance, isolation and how much administration stays with you.

With the domain and DNS it forms the trio that decides whether a site is reachable. The domain is the address, DNS the signpost, and hosting the place the page actually sits.

Hosting is often confused with SaaS. With hosting the company rents an environment and is itself, or through its web supplier, responsible for the application, its updates and its content. With SaaS it gets a finished service including the application, and the provider keeps it running. That decides who patches a security hole in the content management system.

How it works in practice

For a company site on a CMS four things matter: guaranteed availability (uptime), response speed, automatic backups you can restore from, and support including the SSL certificate. Price is usually the least important line.

In the books it is a service charged to costs; hosting paid a year ahead belongs in accruals and deferrals. The account should be registered to the company, not to a supplier’s personal login.

Hosting from a foreign provider arrives with an invoice without Slovak VAT, and the customer accounts for the tax under the reverse charge. A business that is not VAT-registered has to register because of such a service. We often only find out from the bank statement, where card payments for hosting appear with no invoice, so we download invoices from the provider’s portal regularly.

What to watch out for

Cheap hosting only shows up when something goes wrong: slow loading hurts SEO and conversion, a missing backup means lost content, and unreachable support adds hours to an outage. Where the server sits can also matter for GDPR.

Hosting and the domain are paid in advance, and when a payment fails, for example because the card expired, the provider switches the service off after a grace period. Company e-mail often disappears with the website, and the invoices carry an address that no longer works. Renewal dates and the billing e-mail belong to the company, not to one person who may leave.