About Designer's Host Notes

This site compares the hosting and tools used to build sites for clients. It is a research project, not a diary: the comparisons come from the providers' own pricing pages, terms and documentation, read carefully and checked against each other.

Here is the honest version of who is writing. This is a small independent web studio, and it has not personally hosted client sites on every provider listed here. What it does instead is read the parts most people skip — renewal pricing, migration limits, what counts as a “site” on a plan — and report them accurately. Where something has been used first-hand, the page says so. Where it has not, the page says that too.

The one thing this studio does have is data on what actually breaks. It surveyed 1,255 small-business websites, checking each one for mobile usability and a working contact form. 216 were confirmed unusable on a phone — confirmed, because a third of the sites that failed the quick automated check turned out to serve a separate mobile version, and counting those would have inflated the figure. Seven had contact forms that were quietly broken: one silently discarded the visitor's email address, another submitted nothing at all. That is the lens every review here uses: does this tool prevent the failures that real small sites actually suffer?

The aim is narrow on purpose. Instead of covering every product, these notes focus on the small set of hosts and tools that hold up on client work, and are honest about where each one falls short — renewal price jumps, missing features, or plans that only make sense at a certain scale.

How this site stays independent

Some links are affiliate links, which help keep the writing free. They never decide what gets recommended or how it ranks. If a product has a real weakness, it is named. For the full detail, see the Affiliate Disclosure.

A note on identity

This site is published under the “Designer's Host Notes” name rather than a personal brand, so the focus stays on the tools and the trade-offs rather than on any one person. It is written with the help of AI tooling and checked by a human before publishing. No review here claims an experience that did not happen.