Services / Hosting & care
Hosting, with the renewal price printed on the tin
Hosting is where a lot of this industry quietly makes its money — cheap first year, painful renewal, and a domain registered in somebody else's name so leaving is a nightmare. This page exists to be the opposite of that.
£45 a month
£95 for shops. The renewal price is the same as the first year.
The commitment
Four promises, in writing, before you pay anything
You should be suspicious of anyone selling you hosting. It's recurring money for something you can't see and mostly can't check, which is exactly why it gets abused. So here's what I'll put in writing.
1. The renewal price is the same as the first price
No introductory rate that triples in year two. If it ever has to change, you get three months' notice and a reason.
2. The domain is registered to you
In your name, at your address, with the login in your hands. I'm a technical contact, not the owner. This is non-negotiable and I'd walk away from work rather than do it the other way.
3. You can leave any month, and I'll help you go
Thirty days' notice, no exit fee, and I'll hand over a full backup and talk to whoever's taking it on. Holding a website hostage is a shabby way to keep clients.
4. You see what it actually costs me
I'll tell you what the underlying hosting costs and what my margin is for looking after it. If you'd rather host it yourself and pay me only when something breaks, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to want.
What's included
- UK-based hosting, on decent hardware, not the cheapest shared box available
- Daily backups kept off the server, and tested — an untested backup isn't a backup
- Security certificate, firewall and malware monitoring
- WordPress, theme and plugin updates, checked after applying rather than fired blindly
- Uptime monitoring — I usually know before you do
- Small changes included: a phone number, opening hours, a price, a new photo
- Email addresses on your own domain
- Me on the phone when something's wrong
The honest bit
You can absolutely do this cheaper
Basic hosting can be had for a few pounds a month, and if you're comfortable applying updates, keeping backups and dealing with it when a plugin update takes the site down on a Friday, that's a genuinely sensible thing to do. I'd rather say so than sell you something you don't need.
What you're paying me for isn't disk space. It's that updates get checked, backups get tested, and there's a person who answers the phone and fixes it — instead of a support ticket queue and a knowledge base article.
If your site is a simple brochure that rarely changes, cheap hosting and an annual check-in is probably the right call. If it takes bookings or payments, an hour of downtime costs more than a year of looking after it properly.
Not sure who hosts your site right now?
A surprising number of business owners don't know, and finding out is the first step to being in control of it. Tell me your web address on a free call and I'll look it up while we talk — who hosts it, who owns the domain, and when it expires. No charge, and no obligation to move anything.
