Your domain names stay in your own name and on your own payment card rather than ours. That is the one piece of advice on this page that we give anyone, client or not, because we have met too many businesses locked out of their own domain by a supplier who stopped answering.
Hosting and email
We host most of our clients' websites ourselves, and the main reason they like it is that there is nobody else to ring. When a site is showing an error message, or an email has not arrived, or something needs installing, it's sorted out by the people who know the site inside-out; nothing gets passed between a hosting company and a developer who each think it is the other's problem.
What the hosting includes
Our standard business hosting package is £12.92 a month plus VAT, invoiced quarterly, and it is the only charge that recurs. It includes backups taken daily and weekly and kept off site, so a bad day means losing hours rather than years. It includes Imunify360, which deals with the steady background of attacks that every website now attracts whether or not anybody has heard of you. For WordPress sites it includes WP Rocket, the market leading premium plugin for maximising performance.
Most importantly, we’ll be keeping an eye on your site, which is the part that does not appear on an invoice. Accounts get checked for storage creeping towards its limit and for the sort of unusual behaviour that means something is wrong before it becomes something that is broken.
Email, which is where the awkward problems live
Most of the genuinely maddening technical problems a small business meets are email problems. Messages that arrive for some people and not others. Messages that land in junk for one customer and the inbox for the next. A form on the website that stops sending without telling anybody, so the first sign is a customer asking why nobody replied.
Almost all of it comes back to the rules that mail providers use to decide whether a message is trustworthy, and those rules keep tightening. Every year or two the large providers raise the bar, and businesses that were sending happily suddenly find that a proportion of their post stops arriving. Sorting that out means setting up the records that prove your mail is really yours, keeping them right when anything changes, and checking that the website itself sends in a way the providers will accept.
It is dull, unsexy work, and it is the difference between an enquiry reaching you or vanishing into the aether.
Your domains stay yours
If you would rather stay where you are
You do not have to move your hosting to work with us, and plenty of clients have not. If your current arrangement is working, we will work with it, and if it is not we will tell you why rather than simply preferring our own.
Where to start
Tell us what you need, whether that is hosting for a site we are about to build, a move from wherever you are now, or an email problem that has been going on too long. If you have no idea where your site is currently hosted, that is a common enough starting point and finding out is part of the job.