Managed hosting: your website, looked after

Two kinds of customer. If you're on our Website plan, hosting is already included in your £50 a month. Once all 24 payments are made the site is yours, and you can keep us hosting and looking after it on Starter Managed Hosting for £20 a month — or take it wherever you like. You can also take Starter Managed Hosting on its own, for a site you'd like us to host. Online shops and other bigger builds are quoted individually.

Hosting on its own gives your site somewhere to live, and if that's all you need, it's a fair price. The £20 a month also covers the looking-after: small content updates done for you, an info@ address forwarded to your inbox, enquiry messages straight to you, 60 days of change history, a check every morning, and a real person to email or ring. And your site is static, so there's nothing to patch — no plugins or software for you to keep updated.

Online shops, booking systems and members areas are bigger builds, so they're quoted individually — tell us what you need and we'll quote it.

Hosting on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with Cloudflare in front; the HTTPS padlock, with the certificate renewed automatically and its expiry checked every day; 60 days of change history; a check on your site every morning; messages from your site's enquiry form sent straight to your inbox; an info@ address forwarded to the inbox you already use; small content updates (about 30 minutes of work a month); and a real person — Grant — by email or phone. Your site is static, so there's nothing for you to patch.

Text changes, photo swaps and small tweaks to the pages you already have — about 30 minutes of work a month. Just email us what you'd like changed. New pages, design changes, new features and anything bigger are quoted separately. Unused time doesn't roll over to the next month.

Usually, yes — tell us where it's hosted now and we'll take a look first. We point your domain at the new hosting, set up the HTTPS certificate, your info@ email forwarding and your enquiry form, and check it all works. Our hosting is for static sites, with no plugins or database, so if your current site runs on a system that needs those, we'll tell you up front what moving it involves and quote it before anything changes.

Your site and its HTTPS certificate are checked every morning, and we're alerted if the site is down so it can be looked into. It's a once-a-day check, not round-the-clock monitoring — so if you notice a problem first, email or ring us.

Earlier versions of every file on your site are kept for 60 days, so if a change goes wrong it can be rolled back. We also keep a separate copy of your site's code. We'd still recommend keeping your own copies of anything important to you, such as your photos and logo.

Cloudflare sits in front of every site we host, with its standard protection against floods of junk traffic (DDoS attacks). Your HTTPS certificate is issued and renewed automatically, and its expiry is checked every day. And because your site is static — no plugins, no database, no server software — there's nothing for you to patch or keep updated.

You can — they're excellent if you're happy to handle the setup, your domain, your email and your changes yourself. Starter Managed Hosting is for people who'd rather not: we host the site, check it every morning, make small content updates for you, set up your info@ forwarding and enquiry form, and you deal with one person, Grant.

No — small content updates (about 30 minutes of work a month) and an info@ address forwarded to the inbox you already use are included in Starter Managed Hosting and in the Website plan. If you'd like to send email from that address too, we'll set up one mailbox for it on request. Extra mailboxes for staff are charged, and new pages, redesigns or bigger work are quoted separately.

Yes. Hosting taken on its own, or kept on once all 24 Website plan payments are made, can be cancelled with 30 days' notice, and an email is fine. We'll give you a full export of your website files and content so you can move to another provider. During the Website plan's 24 payments, cancelling works differently: that's covered in the Website plan section of our terms.