Website hosting.

If your website hosting is not good enough, your website will be slow, and you will lose business: it’s that simple.

After spending time and money developing a new site and completing web optimisation, you shouldn’t stop there—your website hosting is just as important as your website.

If you’re wondering why your new site, with all its content and SEO, is failing to rank for even the simplest of keywords, your hosting arrangements could be to blame.

There are thousands of options for hosting your website, so choosing the right hosting environment can be tricky.

There are a few basic questions to ask yourself when looking at hosting options:

1. How important is my website to my business?
2. How big is my website?
3. Does my website have complex functionality?
4. Where are my customers?

How important is your website?

In our experience, most businesses, no matter how small, consider their website to be extremely important to their business. Any downtime is seen as an issue, and the site must not be slow.

This suggests that all websites are important to their owners, and therefore, it is not logical to host such an important marketing tool on cheap hosting.

If you are paying less for your hosting than your mobile phone contract, you are doing something wrong.

How big is the website?

The larger the website, the more space you will need to host it, which can affect its performance.

Hosting companies that offer unlimited storage should be avoided. They offer this to everyone, which slows down servers.

If you have a large site with many pages or you host many files on your site, you will need a hosting account designed for this.

Many of the ‘pile it high sell it cheap’ hosting providers host 100s of sites on the same server: if one of them hs a problem, then your site has a problem – you don’t want that.

Is your website complex?

Complex websites with additional functionality, such as the excellent WooCommerce plugin, can be processor-heavy and need hosting to accommodate this.

Like your laptop, if you try to get your server to do too much, it can slow down and eventually crash; hosting is no different. Complex websites need better processors, more RAM and an advanced setup.

Ideally, you want hosting that can scale with demand, and this is something we can help with.

Where are your customers?

If your customers are mainly UK-based, you want your website hosted in the UK or at least a UK-based cache. Ideally, your site should be hosted in the same country as your customers, whilst this is not quite as important as it used to be (data centres are global), it can make a difference.

The main reason for this is to reduce latency and make your site load faster, but there are other benefits that we’ll cover.

Hosting is easy when things go right, but like any software-based infrastructure, it can go wrong.

If it does, you will need some technical knowledge to fix it, which is why over 150 businesses of all sizes choose to have us manage their hosting.

Avoid getting put in the middle.

Some hosting companies have a favourite phrase:

If your website is down, you will need to contact your web developers.

This happens all too often on less reputable hosting—the hosting support team simply pushes you away to your website developers, who then push you back to the hosting company.

This inevitably puts you in the middle with no solution and seemingly no one to resolve the issue.

When we manage your hosting, we take it personally and get any issues fixed for you, fast.

For some larger clients, they own the server; we provide the management.

This arrangement works well when the site is larger or more complex, and our client wants to have the hosting contract under their management.

We have full server access to manage the server and charge a small monthly or annual fee to manage the hosting environment on their behalf.

Why go to all the trouble of making your website as good as it can be to try it and host it on a cheap-as-chips account?

It’s well known that website speed is a key factor in Google’s algorithm when deciding which websites to rank.

Using cheap website hosting can mean that your site is facing an uphill struggle as free or cheap hosting accounts will affect the following:

• Time to first byte – this is how long it takes your server to deliver the first data to the visitor’s browser – this includes the time it takes to connect (the wait) and the time taken to respond
• Delivery of the data – how long it actually takes the server to serve up the files to the browser
• How well is your site ranked – is your site sitting on the same server as a load of spammy websites? Google will not like that.

Regarding WordPress hosting, it’s best to have an agency that fully understands your WordPress install and a hosting company that understands the unique requirements of hosting WordPress websites.

When we host your website, your site will live on what we think is some of the best UK website hosting.

We use UK-based data centres (as well as global CDNs), and we are your first point of contact for anything hosting-related.

For non-WordPress sites, there are alternative types of web hosting available, so we can discuss the options – whatever your site is built with.

We look after everything – from DNS and email to your website and the server. Should anything go wrong, you can call our team and we’ll get on it right away.

We also have our own server support staff that are responsive and (as we are a big customer) we get preferential treatment.

We’ve found that simply by moving sites to our hosting we improve the Page Speed score of that website by up to twenty points – good hosting really does make a difference.

We partner with the best hosting companies to provide the best hosting for your website.

With over 25 years of experience managing hosting, we’ve kissed many frogs, so we now only use the best for our managed hosting services.

The platforms we use to host sites all provide the following:

• Rolling 30-day backups with one-click backup and restore
• Multiple environments for testing and staging
• SSL certificates are included in the hosting fees
• Cloudflare integration
• Ultra-fast caching and optimisation
• Unparalleled technical support
• UK-based data centres or caches

For larger sites, there are lots more optimisation options, redundancy and bespoke hosting platforms.

We host many sites, from a large Housing Association with tens of thousands of monthly visitors to small personal blogs.

We also help clients manage their WordPress websites daily – we call this SiteCare.

Hosting is hosting; site management and technical support and updates are different, so we provide a service called SiteCare to help our clients with their WordPress installation.

Charges start from £40 ex VAT per month.