For a small business website, shared hosting is enough, and a web hosting comparison comes down to three things, not the promo price: what you pay once the promotion ends, whether a domain is included, and how files get onto the server. According to the providers' pricing pages on 04.11.2026, the entry plan after the promotion costs 1.90 euros a month at Hetzner (without a domain), 4.95 euros at All-Inkl, 5 euros at Strato and 6 euros at IONOS, all including German VAT. Over three years, those entry plans land between roughly 86 and 208 euros. Upload options differ more: Strato and IONOS include SFTP in every plan, All-Inkl only from Premium, Vercel and Netlify have no FTP; there the site arrives via Git. If an AI employee does the upload, you need SFTP or Git and a separate, tightly limited login.
The hosts here are common in Germany, plus Vercel and Netlify. Ralf, my AI employee for websites, maintains kevinwelter.com technically (Build and Modernize a Website With AI). Overall costs are in What Does a Website or Landing Page Cost?, recurring work after launch in Website Maintenance: Tasks, Checklist, Cost.
Web hosting comparison: the plans at a glance
All figures from the official pricing pages, retrieved 04.11.2026 (as of November 2026). Euro prices include 19 percent German VAT, dollar prices exclude tax.
Two catches in the small print: Vercel says its free Hobby plan is "for personal, non-commercial use", so a business site needs Pro. And Netlify is testing prices; the page source shows several amounts per plan and "See pricing in your dashboard".
What hosting costs over three years
Over 36 months at today's prices:
Storage, domain and upload decide. Hetzner S is cheapest but has 10 GB and no domain. All-Inkl is cheapest with a domain, but SFTP only comes with Premium. At Strato the price depends on the term: on a monthly term, Starter costs €6 plus a €10 setup fee.
Which type of hosting fits your site
SFTP vs FTP: which upload is safe
Plain FTP sends the password unencrypted; RFC 2577 says "Standard FTP … sends passwords in clear text". Anyone listening along the way has your login. There are two safe options:
- FTPS is FTP with TLS encryption, specified in RFC 4217, usually on port 21. Hetzner advises choosing "explicit (FTPES)" in your client. All-Inkl's FileZilla guide confirms that encrypted connections work.
- SFTP shares only the name with FTP. It runs over SSH, usually on port 22, and allows key-based login instead of a password. For scripts and AI employees, it is the better choice.
For an AI employee, it also matters whether you can give it its own login that reaches only the website folder:
Upload a website via SFTP: how the test with an AI employee went
My production changes don't arrive via SFTP but through ArgoCD from Git (more below). So I recreated the SFTP route in a test on my own machine, with the commands an AI employee runs and no real account: an SFTP server in Docker (atmoz/sftp), one user that may only use SFTP, sees only its own folder and logs in only with a fresh test key.
1. Check the host key. Before the first upload, the agent compares the server's fingerprint with a second source, here straight from the container. Both matched; from then on it connects only with StrictHostKeyChecking=yes.
2. Upload in batch mode. Every step sits in a file:
cd public_html
mkdir css
put site/index.html index.html
put site/kontakt.html kontakt.html
put site/css/style.css css/style.css
sftp -i keys/ki_upload_test -P 2222 -o UserKnownHostsFile=known_hosts_test \
-o StrictHostKeyChecking=yes -o BatchMode=yes -b upload.batch webupload@127.0.0.1
3. Check what arrived. The agent downloads the files into an empty folder and compares SHA-256 checksums:
$ shasum -a 256 -c ../lokal.sha256
index.html: OK
kontakt.html: OK
css/style.css: OK
4. Upload only changes. For the second upload the agent used lftp mirror --reverse --only-newer; only the changed kontakt.html went up, with a matching checksum.
5. Test the limits. Password-only login: "Permission denied". A shell command: "This service allows sftp connections only." An upload to the root outside public_html: "Permission denied". That is what an AI employee's login should look like.
Two things stood out. The current OpenSSH client warned on every connection that the server used no post-quantum key exchange; the image dates from July 2024, and with a real host that is a question for support. And rsync failed because the server only allows SFTP; rsync needs a plan with SSH.
The access rules from Website Maintenance: Tasks, Checklist, Cost apply: one revocable login per employee, credentials never in the chat. On top of that, uploads happen only after approval. Ralf can prepare the build and delivery and verify the finished site; according to his page, the actual launch always needs explicit approval.
Self-hosting: how my own sites run
My own services, including this website, run on a k3s cluster on Hetzner Cloud (Kubernetes on Hetzner: k3s in Production); changes come from Git through ArgoCD (GitOps with ArgoCD: Deploy from Git), more on that in the website maintenance post.
For a small business website, that is too much. If you face that decision anyway, I help you weigh control, effort, data sovereignty and cost on Kubernetes Expert: Consulting and Operations.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest web hosting for a small business?
Per the pricing pages on 04.11.2026, Hetzner Webhosting S at €1.90 a month, with 10 GB and no domain. With a domain, All-Inkl Privat (€4.95) and Strato Starter (€5 on a 12-month term) lead. Calculate over three years.
Is FTP still safe?
Plain FTP is not, because the password travels in clear text. Use SFTP or FTPS. Every classic host in this comparison offers at least one of them; Vercel and Netlify have no FTP at all.
How much web space does my website need?
Measure it: your hosting panel shows your site's size, or run du -sh in the project folder of a static site. The test site above was under 1,000 bytes; images, videos and backups fill the space. At All-Inkl, web space, email and databases share one quota.
Can an AI employee upload to my hosting?
Yes, with its own SFTP login limited to the website folder, a key instead of a password where the host allows it, and checksums after every upload. Launch approval stays with you.
Where to go from here
Check your contract: what do you pay after the promotion, is the domain included, does your plan have SFTP? Then create a login for the website folder only instead of handing out your main one. How Ralf works from analysis to handover is on his page. Ralf is included as a ready-made template in the Premium tier of my community at 149 US dollars a month (as of October 29, 2026, per his page), together with the other AI employees in the AI Employee Framework.
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