By KYN AI Advisory Team — AI implementation specialists, Singapore
Hosting is the part of a website nobody sees until it fails. For a Singapore SME the choice is between three shapes: shared hosting from a web host, a platform like Vercel, or a container service like Google Cloud Run. Each answers five questions differently.
What does each option cost per month?
- Shared hosting: a fixed monthly fee for a slice of a server. Cheap, predictable, and slow under load. Suits a WordPress brochure site with little traffic.
- Vercel: a free tier for small sites and a paid plan per team member for commercial use. Built for Next.js. Cost grows with bandwidth and build minutes, which for most SME sites stays low.
- Google Cloud Run: pay for compute while a request is being served, scale to zero when idle. A small site costs almost nothing; a busy site scales without a plan change. More setup than Vercel, more control.
The hosting bill is rarely the expensive part. The expensive part is the hours spent when something breaks, which is where the other four questions matter.
Where does your data sit and why does it matter?
A website's data is the database behind the forms, the leads, the client portal and the content. Its location matters for three reasons: latency to Singapore visitors, the data protection obligations your contracts carry, and what you can promise a client who asks.
- Shared hosting: the server is wherever the host put it, often outside the region.
- Vercel: pages are served from the edge worldwide; the database is wherever you host it, which should be a Singapore region.
- Google Cloud Run: choose the Singapore region for the service and the database, and the data stays there.
From our own builds: client systems with a database run in a Singapore region by default, with the location written into the handover document so the question is never answered from memory.
What happens when a deploy fails?
Every change to a site is a deploy. A failed deploy that nobody notices leaves the old version live, or worse, a broken one.
From our own builds: one deploy step failed silently for 17 hours. The commit was fine, the build was reported as skipped, and the site stayed on the previous version until a live check found it. The fix was a rule, not a tool: after every push, check the deployment status on the host, not the commit in the repository, and alert if the live site does not carry the new version.
- Shared hosting: deploys are usually FTP or a control panel upload. Failures are silent by nature.
- Vercel: each push produces a deployment with a status and a preview URL. Still, a misconfigured build step can report success while deploying nothing. Verify the live version.
- Google Cloud Run: a new revision is created on each deploy and traffic is moved to it. A failed revision keeps traffic on the old one. Verify the revision serving traffic.
Who holds the DNS and email records?
The domain's DNS is where the website, the email and the security records all meet. Whoever controls it controls all three.
- The domain should be registered in the business's own account, never the agency's.
- The DNS zone should be documented: A or CNAME for the site, MX for mail, SPF, DKIM and DMARC for mail security, verification records for Search Console and Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
- Moving a site between hosts changes one or two records. Moving email changes different ones. Keep the two documented separately so a website change never breaks mail.
From our own builds: a brand's DNS was moved from a registrar's nameservers to the host's nameservers with the mail records recreated first, so the website moved and the mail never stopped.
How do backups and rollbacks work?
A rollback is restoring the previous version of the site. A backup is restoring the data.
- Shared hosting: backups depend on the host's plan. Rollbacks mean re-uploading old files.
- Vercel: every deployment is kept; rollback is one click to a previous deployment. The database is separate and needs its own backup.
- Google Cloud Run: every revision is kept; rollback is moving traffic to a previous revision. Cloud SQL takes daily backups with point-in-time recovery.
The rule for any option: daily database backups, kept for at least 30 days, restored once to prove they work. A backup that has never been restored is an assumption.
Hosting, DNS, email records, backups and deploy checks are the infrastructure layer under a website. They are easier to run when the same team that built the site owns them, with the records documented and the deploy verified every time. See the infrastructure layer under your website.
Frequently asked questions
Is Vercel or Cloud Run better for a Next.js site?
Vercel is simpler and built for it. Cloud Run gives more control over region, networking and cost at scale. For most SME sites, Vercel; for a site with a database and strict data location requirements, Cloud Run in the Singapore region.
Can I keep my email with my current provider if I move hosting?
Yes. Email records and website records are separate entries in the same DNS zone. Change only the website records.
What should a hosting handover document contain?
Registrar login ownership, every DNS record with its purpose, the hosting account owner, how to deploy, how to roll back, where backups are and how to restore one.
Checked October 2026.
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