What "hosting and care" actually covers, month by month
A plain list of what happens to a website I look after over a typical year. Backups, updates, the odd fire, and the things nobody notices because they never go wrong.
2 min readMichael Overton
"Hosting and care" is a phrase that sounds like it means something and could mean anything. From £150 a year, email included, is the price. This is the other half: what you're actually paying for, laid out across a year, so you can decide whether it's worth it.
Every night
At three in the morning, every site I host is copied in full, files and database, to storage that isn't the server it lives on. If the worst happens, the site comes back from last night, not from a rebuild. Nobody has ever needed me to tell them this. That's rather the point.
Every day
Monitoring checks every site from outside, every minute, and tells me if one stops answering. Security logs are watched for the usual knocking: login attempts, probes for known holes, bots looking for forms to fill with rubbish. The firewall and spam filter deal with nearly all of it before it reaches your site. The response time across everything I host stays under 50 milliseconds, end to end, and I know within the hour if that changes.
Every week
Updates. WordPress, plugins and themes release fixes constantly, and some of them matter. I read what changed, apply them to a copy first if there's any doubt, then to the live site. Most weeks this is uneventful. Occasionally a plugin update breaks something and I find out before you do, because that's what the copy is for.
Every month
A proper look. Speed scores rechecked. Broken links hunted. Forms submitted to make sure the email still arrives. Certificates confirmed as renewing. Disk and database tidied. This is the gardening, and it's the part most hosting companies never do, because it needs a person.
When something happens
A client messages on a Thursday: the site felt slow yesterday. I find it (an image plugin misbehaving), fix it, and reply the same day. Another wants a booking page before the weekend. It's there by Thursday. This is the direct line, and it's the reason people stay. You're not raising a ticket. You're messaging the person who built it.
When you want to change something
Small things are just done. New photos, a changed price, a new team member on the About page. Bigger things get a quote, in writing, before they start, the same as any project. The site keeps improving instead of quietly dating.
What it isn't
It isn't a retainer for new design work. It isn't unlimited changes. And it isn't rented from a big hosting company with my name on the invoice: the servers are mine, set up and run by me, which is why I can promise all of the above.
The honest comparison
Cheap hosting is about £5 a month and comes with nobody. What I charge is about £12.50 a month and comes with me. If your website is a brochure you glance at once a year, the first is fine. If it's how customers find and judge your business, the second is the cheapest insurance you'll buy.
Questions about a site you already have, hosted or not, are welcome. Send me the address and I'll tell you what I see. If it's an older site, read this first.
