Hosting and care, explained

Nearly every website quote has a monthly figure on it somewhere, and nearly every owner we meet is unsure what it pays for. Some think it is a fee for nothing. Some are paying it to a supplier who has not touched the site in two years. Here is what hosting and care actually are, what a fair plan includes, what to ask any provider, and the honest cases where you do not need one.

Hosting: where the site lives

A website is a set of files. Hosting is the computer that holds them and hands them to anyone who types your address. That computer belongs to a hosting company, and it is rented by the month or the year.

Hosting is not all the same. The cheapest kind puts your site on one machine shared with hundreds of others; if that machine is busy or breaks, your site is slow or gone. The kind we use spreads the site across a worldwide network, so it is served from somewhere close to whoever is looking at it and there is no single machine to fail. For a site that is mostly pages, as most small business sites are, that is both faster and cheaper than it sounds, which is why we can include it in a plan rather than sell it separately.

What you should know about your own hosting: where it is, who pays for it, and what happens if that payment stops. If you do not know, ask. We wrote about the domain side of this in who owns your website, and the same rule applies to hosting: the account should be in your name or clearly assigned to you in a contract.

The domain and the padlock

Two small things sit alongside hosting and are often bundled into the same monthly fee.

The domain renewal. Your address has to be renewed every year or two. It is cheap and it is the one thing that must never lapse. A good plan either includes it or makes very sure you know when it is due.

The padlock. The small padlock in the browser’s address bar means the connection between your visitor and your site is encrypted. Browsers mark sites without it as “not secure”, which is not a look you want next to your business name. This used to be sold as a yearly add-on. On modern hosting it is included and renews itself, and if anyone is charging you for it separately, ask why.

Care: keeping it working

Hosting keeps the site online. Care keeps it working, secure, and the way you want it. It is the part that varies most between suppliers, so this is where to read the small print. A proper plan covers five things.

Updates

Most websites run on software that is updated often, and the updates fix security problems. A site that is never updated is, eventually, a site that gets broken into. The National Cyber Security Centre’s small business guide puts keeping software up to date near the top of its list for exactly this reason. On a plan, someone applies those updates, checks the site still works afterwards, and fixes it if it does not. Sites built the way we build them have far less to update, because there is no software running on a server to patch, but the principle is the same: someone is responsible for it.

Backups

A copy of the site, taken regularly, kept somewhere other than the server it runs on. The question to ask is not “do you take backups” but “when did you last restore one”. A backup that has never been tested is a hope, not a backup.

Monitoring

Something checks the site is up, every few minutes, and tells a person when it is not. Without this, the way you find out your site is down is a customer telling you, often days later. With it, the person who built the site often knows before you do.

Security

Beyond updates: the settings that stop the common attacks, the checks that nothing has been tampered with, and the response when something looks wrong. For a small business site this is unglamorous and mostly invisible, which is why it gets skipped by people who are not being paid to do it.

Changes

The first thing every owner wants, a fortnight after launch, is a change. A new photo, a price, a service you have added, a team member who has left. A care plan should say plainly whether small changes are included, how many, how fast, and what counts as small. “We built it, we host it, we fix it” is our version: changes you ask for are made by the people who built the site, and you have one number to ring.

What a plan should not be

A monthly fee is not a licence to do nothing. Signs of a plan that is not worth paying for:

• Nobody has contacted you in a year, and the site has not changed.
• You cannot name the person who would answer if the site went down.
• The plan is a minimum term of years with a penalty for leaving.
• Leaving the plan means losing the site, because the hosting account, the domain or the code is theirs.
• “Monitoring” means they will look if you tell them something is wrong.

And a sign of one that is: you can leave at any time and take the site with you, and you would rather not, because the service is good.

What to ask any provider

1. What is included each month, as a list?
2. What is not included, and what does it cost when I need it?
3. Who do I ring when the site is down on a Saturday afternoon, and when will they answer?
4. When did you last restore a backup, and how old was it?
5. If I stop paying, what happens to the site, the domain and the email?
6. Is there a minimum term?
7. Can you show me the site is being monitored?

A supplier who answers all seven in plain words, without a brochure, is probably one you can trust with it.

When you do not need a plan

We sell care plans, so take this with that in mind, but there are cases where you should not buy one.

You are on a site builder. Wix, Squarespace and Shopify include hosting, the padlock, updates and backups in the subscription. There is nobody to ring, but there is also nothing extra to pay. If you are happy making your own changes, you do not need a care plan on top. The trade-offs are in Wix, Squarespace or Shopify.

The site is a single page that never changes. A one-page site with your number, your area and your hours, built on hosting that renews itself, can sit there for years. Put the domain renewal in your diary and check it loads once a month.

You have someone technical in the business who is happy to be responsible for it. The job is not hard; the point is that it is somebody’s job. If it is theirs, it does not also need to be ours.

In every other case, the honest comparison is between paying a modest monthly amount and having a person responsible for the site, or paying nothing and being that person yourself. Most owners we meet have tried the second and are fed up with it.

How ours works

Hosting and care is a monthly plan agreed with you when we quote the build, so there is nothing to work out later and no price list to decode. It covers the hosting, the domain renewal, the padlock, updates, backups, monitoring, and changes when you ask, made by the same people who built the site. You can leave whenever you like, and the site, its code and its assets are yours, so if you do leave it goes with you.

If you already have a site and only want it looked after, we can usually do that too, though we will tell you honestly if it is built in a way that makes it hard to look after. What that costs for your site is a fixed quote in writing, and the first step is the form.

For what the build itself costs, and the running costs to budget for, read how much a website costs in the UK.