What is hosting and an SSL certificate?

Hosting

If a domain is your business's address, then hosting is the plot of land and the building your business sits in. It's the place (a server) where your website is physically stored — files, photos, text — and from where it's served to visitors all over the world, 24 hours a day.

Without hosting, a domain would lead nowhere — like an address with no building behind it.

SSL certificate

An SSL certificate is the padlock you see next to a website's address in your browser. It means the connection between a visitor and your site is encrypted and secure — data (e.g. entered into a form) can't be intercepted along the way.

Sites without SSL are flagged by browsers as "not secure," which puts visitors off and hurts a company's credibility. Google also favors sites with SSL in search results.

Who pays for it and who sets it up

An SSL certificate is standard in every package — you don't buy it separately, and the padlock is there next to the address from launch day.

Hosting works a little differently. The account with the hosting company is opened in your name, and you pay for it according to the provider's price list, with no margin from us — so any hosting invoice comes from the provider, not from us. In practice, Cloudflare hosting, which is what we build sites on, is usually free for a site like yours. Who opens and configures that account depends on your package: in Professional and Expert, or with the "Domain and hosting setup" add-on, we do it. In Business Card you go through it yourself, with the help of Domain and hosting, step by step — and publishing the site itself is still on us.

You can see how the packages differ in Packages — what each one includes.