This website runs on Xserver.
When a website gets built, the choice of server is the thing that tends to get left until last. Hand it to an agency and it is often settled with “this is what we standardise on”. But a server, once chosen, does not move for years, so it is worth a little thought.
Here is what we compared, and what decided it.
The options we compared
Broadly, there were two directions.
1. Shared hosting (Xserver, Sakura Internet, Lolipop and so on) A few hundred to a few thousand yen a month. Email, PHP and a database all come with it.
2. Free hosting for static sites (Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages and so on) If what you end up with is only HTML, as with this site, you can host it for free. It is fast, too.
Honestly, on display speed alone, option 2 has the advantage. We went with option 1 anyway.
The three criteria that decided it
1. Can the email live in the same place
This is the biggest reason.
Our company email addresses are @oes.co.jp. With the domain, the email and the website in one place, there is one place to manage. And no accident where moving the site takes the email down with it.
In practice, for this site we made a separate address, web@oes.co.jp, and forward it to the info@ we use internally. That is so the address published on the site can be thrown away and remade if it gets swamped. Being able to do that from the server’s control panel in a few minutes matters in day-to-day work.
Go with free hosting and the email has to live with another service (Google Workspace or similar). That is fine as far as it goes, but it is one more contract and one more control panel.
2. Does PHP run
The site itself is “just HTML” — no program runs when a page is displayed. But two places needed server-side processing.
- Receiving contact form submissions and sending the automatic reply
- The chat AI’s responses
These are written in PHP and sit on the same server. Free hosting has its own ways to run functions, but those come with their own configuration and their own limits. We judged that everything finishing in one place is clearer for whoever touches it later.
3. How easy it is to move
“Can we switch away easily” was a criterion too.
- Owning your own domain (not a free one tied to the hosting company)
- Having the contents of the site as files in your own hands
- Backups being taken automatically
Everything on this site exists as files we hold. Put crudely, put the files on a different server and the move is done. Keep it in that state and you are not at the mercy of a hosting company’s price rises or outages.
On pricing
For reference, Xserver’s official pricing (as of 16 August 2026).
| Plan | 12-month term | 36-month term | Disk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | 990 yen/month | 693 yen/month | 500GB |
| Premium | 1,980 yen/month | 1,386 yen/month | 600GB |
| Business | 3,960 yen/month | 2,772 yen/month | 700GB |
All tax included, with no setup fee. These were discounted campaign prices at the time of writing, so please check the actual figures on the official site.
For one company website, the cheapest plan is enough. The higher plans differ mainly in disk space and processing power, which makes no difference on a site with a few thousand visitors a month.
In summary
- On display speed alone, free static hosting has the advantage. There are still reasons to choose shared hosting
- What a small firm should look at is 1. can the email live in the same place 2. do you need server-side processing 3. are you in a state where you can move
- Keep the contents of the site as files in your own hands and you can choose again later
One more thing: “a better server makes it faster” is not necessarily true. How fast a site displays is decided more by how the site is built. That is a subject for another article.