How the price can be that low
A server is a fixed cost, so the way to sell space on it for almost nothing is to sell that space many times over. Hundreds of websites on one crowded machine, each paying a little, none getting much. The host is not losing money on you at that price. You are just sharing your slice with more neighbours than the brochure photographed.
The renewal is the real price
The famous low number is almost always a first-term teaser, and the small print says so. When renewal arrives, the price steps up to the standard rate, which can be several times what you signed at, and by then your site, your email and your habits all live there. Moving feels like more work than paying, and that feeling is the business model.
The one line worth reading before you buy any hosting is not the headline price. It is the renewal price, and it is always findable, just never nearby.
The extras that used to be included
Backups, malware cleanup, decent email, sometimes even switching your site on again after a problem: at the cheap end these have a way of becoming add-ons with their own monthly fees. Stack two or three of them and the bargain quietly costs what honest hosting costs, except the looking-after still is not included. We keep the comparison plain in managed hosting vs shared hosting, the real difference.
What your visitors pay
A crowded server is a slow server, and slow pages lose people before the page finishes loading. You will not see it in the hosting dashboard. You will see it as fewer calls, fewer forms, fewer sales, none of which arrive labelled with the reason. Speed is one of the quiet things people never blame on their bargain, and it is regularly the bargain’s fault.
When cheap web hosting is honestly fine
A hobby project, a personal blog, a site with no revenue riding on it and a technically comfortable owner: cheap shared hosting is a perfectly sensible home for all of those, and anyone who pressures you toward more is selling, not advising. The line is money. The moment a website earns, its hosting is infrastructure, not stationery. If you are unsure which side of that line you are on, our honest test for managed hosting takes two minutes.
The honest bit
Expensive hosting is not automatically good hosting, either. The questions that actually sort hosts are boring: what is the renewal price, where do backups live and who has tested one, what happens to email if you leave, and who answers when it breaks. Our web hosting page answers all four in writing, and any host worth paying should be able to do the same. If the site being slow is not your only problem, and it also needs updates, fixes and content, that is website management, which is a different job than hosting.