Choosing a web hosting plan can feel like buying an airline ticket - the advertised price looks reasonable until you add luggage, seat selection, and a meal, and suddenly you are paying three times what you expected. We built dotCanada differently. Every plan comes with what we consider the non-negotiables, bundled in from day one.
What Shared Hosting Is
Shared hosting means your website lives on a server alongside other customers' websites. The server resources - CPU, memory, and disk - are shared across accounts, which keeps costs lower than having a dedicated server. For the vast majority of small businesses, blogs, portfolios, and informational websites, shared hosting provides more than enough performance and reliability at a price that makes sense.
Shared hosting is the right starting point for most Canadian businesses launching their first website or running a site that does not need specialized infrastructure.
What Every dotCanada Plan Includes
Canadian data centre - Your website lives on servers physically located in Canada. This means your data is subject to Canadian law, not US legislation like the CLOUD Act. It also means lower latency and faster load times for your Canadian visitors. This is not a premium feature - it is the foundation of everything we do.
cPanel control panel - cPanel is the industry-standard hosting control panel, used by millions of websites worldwide. It gives you a visual interface to manage your files, databases, email accounts, and domains without needing to use the command line. Every dotCanada account includes full cPanel access.
Free SSL certificate - All plans include a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate, automatically installed and renewed. Your site runs on HTTPS from day one. There is no reason to pay extra for basic SSL in 2025, and we do not charge for it.
One-click WordPress install via Softaculous - WordPress powers over 40% of the web, and we make installing it trivial. Softaculous is built into cPanel and lets you deploy a fresh WordPress installation in under two minutes, with your domain, database, and admin credentials configured automatically.
Professional email - Every plan includes email hosting for your domain. You can create hello@yourbusiness.ca, info@yourbusiness.ca, or as many email addresses as your plan allows. Manage your email through Webmail (accessible from any browser), or connect to any email client using IMAP or POP3.
Daily backups - We run automated daily backups of your entire account - files, databases, and email. Backups are retained for a rolling period so you have restore points to fall back on. In most cases you can restore a backup yourself through cPanel without needing to contact support.
24/7 Canadian support - Our support team is based in Canada. When you open a ticket or start a chat, you reach someone who understands the Canadian business context and is not reading from a script on the other side of the world. We are available around the clock because websites do not keep business hours.
Why We Include These by Default
Some hosting companies treat SSL certificates, daily backups, and email as paid add-ons. We think that is backwards. A website without HTTPS is penalized by browsers and search engines. A website without backups is one bad plugin update away from losing everything. Email is how businesses communicate.
These are not optional extras - they are the minimum viable hosting stack for a serious website. We include them because leaving them out would mean setting our customers up to fail.
How Our Plans Scale
Our plans differ primarily in storage, the number of addon domains, and resource allocations. A personal blog or portfolio does not need the same resources as an e-commerce store with thousands of products. Our plans are structured so you can start with what you need and upgrade seamlessly as your site grows - without any downtime or technical migration work.
Who Shared Hosting Is Best For
Shared hosting is the right choice for:
- Small businesses - An informational site with your services, contact info, and blog
- Portfolios - Showcasing your work as a freelancer, photographer, or creative
- Personal blogs - Writing for an audience of any size up to tens of thousands of monthly visitors
- Non-profits and community organizations - Getting online affordably without compromising on the basics
- Startup sites - Getting your first web presence established while you build
If your site grows to a point where shared hosting resources are not enough - typically when you have very high traffic, run a large e-commerce operation, or have specialized performance requirements - we can discuss VPS or managed WordPress options. But for most Canadian businesses, shared hosting handles everything they need.
Getting Started
Creating a dotCanada account takes about five minutes. Choose your plan, register or transfer your domain, and your hosting account is ready immediately. From there, installing WordPress with Softaculous takes another two minutes. You can be publishing content the same day you sign up.
