Website hosting cost depends on your traffic volume, performance requirements, and technical expertise. For a small business site under 10,000 monthly visitors, shared hosting at $5–15/month CAD works fine. You'll get adequate uptime and support, though you share server resources with other sites. Popular options include SiteGround, HostPapa (Canadian), or Bluehost. Managed WordPress hosting ($25–50/month) makes sense when you need better performance, automatic updates, and staging environments without managing servers yourself. Services like WP Engine or Kinsta handle security patches and caching, which saves time if you're running an active business site. This range handles most small-to-medium sites comfortably. VPS or cloud hosting ($50–300/month) becomes necessary around 50,000+ monthly visitors or when you need guaranteed resources. You get dedicated CPU and RAM allocation, which prevents other sites from slowing yours down. Digital Ocean, Linode, or AWS Lightsail work here, though you'll need some technical knowledge or a developer to configure them properly. For our portfolio at Ottawa SEO, we run most sites on managed WordPress hosting because the time saved on maintenance justifies the cost. High-traffic properties go on VPS instances where we control caching rules and server configuration. We've seen clients waste money on expensive hosting they don't need, or lose rankings because $6/month shared hosting couldn't handle a traffic spike. Dedicated servers ($200–1,000+/month) only make sense for enterprise sites with sustained high traffic or specific compliance requirements. E-commerce sites processing sensitive data sometimes need this level of control. Avoid hosts that upsell aggressively or lock you into 3-year contracts. Month-to-month or annual terms give you flexibility to scale. The cheapest option usually costs more long-term through downtime or migration headaches. Budget $25–50/month for a professional business site and you'll cover quality hosting plus a basic CDN for faster global delivery.