The honest comparison
Why pick us over a national brandyou’ve already heard of?
We are not cheaper than the cheapest tier of the cheapest host. We’re also not pretending to be. Here’s a candid side-by-side so you can decide where your money is better spent.
The big-box version
LightHouse
01
Who picks up the phone
Tier-1 contractor reading a script. Two escalations before anyone can actually touch your account.
Whoever built your site. Usually within an hour, often the same minute.
02
What “managed hosting” means
A shared server with a thousand other sites, an upsell email every quarter, and a control panel you have to learn.
We run the box. You don’t see the control panel because you don’t need to.
03
Network security
“Free” antivirus, an off-the-shelf router from the ISP, and a recommendation to call someone else.
A hardened firewall appliance on-site, tuned and patched by us.
04
Pricing
Three teaser tiers, a renewal-rate surprise in year two, and add-ons billed in dollars-per-mailbox-per-month.
A flat number we send you before you sign anything. It doesn’t move because we got bigger.
05
If you leave
Migration is your problem. Source code, content, and email might or might not be portable.
Full export of source, content, and email. Domain transferred to your name. We’ll help your next vendor for free.
06
Where we live
A logo and a P.O. box in a state you’ve never visited.
Winston-Salem, NC. You can come by.
The “big box” column isn’t a strawman. It’s composited from the actual experiences of clients who came to us from GoDaddy, Wix, Squarespace, Cox Business, and a couple of regional franchise IT shops we’ll politely not name.
When we’re honestly not the right call
If you need the absolute cheapest hosting on the internet, you want a $7/month plan from a hyperscaler, not us. If you just need a one-page placeholder and don’t care if it’s slow, Wix is fine. We’re for businesses where the site and the network are part of how you make money — and outages cost you more than they cost us.