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Breitloh

Hosting that costs what it should

Hosting is sold as a monthly fee and bought as a worry: whether the site will stay up, whether anyone is watching it, and whether the invoice will grow. It should be dull, it should be in your name, and for a site built properly it should cost less than most people are paying.

Book a callWebsite support and maintenance
One site served from several places at once, with the annual running cost falling

Where it usually hurts

You are paying for the software, not the server
Managed hosting is priced for keeping a fragile platform alive: updates, patching, malware scanning, and a backup you hope works. A site with none of those moving parts does not need that service, and should not carry its price.
The bill has quiet passengers
Hosting, then a builder licence, an SEO plugin, a forms plugin, a backup plugin, a security plugin, and a stock photo subscription nobody has opened in a year. Individually small, and together often more than the hosting.
It is in somebody else's name
The account belongs to an agency, the card on file is theirs, and leaving means asking politely for a copy of your own site. Hosting held for you is a lever, whether or not anyone ever pulls it.

What the job covers

  • An honest total of what you pay today, licences and subscriptions included, before anything is recommended
  • Hosting set up in your own account, in your company's name, with your card and your access
  • The site deployed and the domain moved without downtime, out of hours, with the old site left running until the new one answers
  • Uptime monitoring that tells somebody, and backups that have actually been restored once rather than merely configured
  • A yearly figure you can put in a budget, with the things that could change it named up front

What it has to talk to

Where the site runs
For the sites I build, a global network that serves pages from close to whoever asked for them. It is fast, it stays up under a spike, and for a site of ordinary size it costs very little.
Your domain and DNS
Hosting and email share a DNS zone, so a hosting move is planned around the email rather than dropped on top of it. The order of those two steps is the difference between a quiet evening and a bad one.
Whatever the site talks to
The content system, the payment provider, and any system holding your data stay in your own accounts, so hosting is a place the site runs rather than a place your business is kept.

A worked approach, not a client

How I would work out what your site should cost to run

  1. 01

    Add up what is actually being paid

    Hosting, licences, subscriptions, and the renewal that comes out of somebody's personal card. It is a dull hour and it usually finds a few hundred pounds a year that nobody would defend out loud.

  2. 02

    Match the hosting to the site

    A brochure site, a site with a member area, and a site taking bookings have genuinely different needs. Paying for the biggest of those when you have the smallest is the most common overspend I see.

  3. 03

    Move it, then prove it

    Set up in your account, deployed, tested, and switched over out of hours, with monitoring and a restored backup before anyone calls it done. A backup nobody has restored is a hope, not a backup.

Questions I get asked about this

The ones that come up on almost every first call. If yours is not here, ask it and you will get a straight answer.

What should website hosting cost?

For a well built site of ordinary size, tens of pounds a year rather than hundreds. Managed WordPress hosting is usually twenty to fifty pounds a month because it is paying for maintenance of the platform, not for the server. Take the platform away and most of that cost goes with it.

Is cheap hosting a false economy?

Cheap shared hosting usually is, because you are on a machine with hundreds of other sites and their problems. That is a different question from paying a lot. The sweet spot is infrastructure that is genuinely good and genuinely cheap for the shape of site you have, which is what a static site on a global network gives you.

How do we reduce our website running costs?

Count everything first, including licences, because that is where the money usually is. Then remove the things that exist to prop up the platform. A site with no plugins to license, no page builder subscription, and no server to patch takes most of the recurring cost out permanently, which is one of the real arguments for moving off WordPress.

Who owns the hosting account?

You do, always, on your card and in your company's name. I will happily be an invited user so I can help, and that access can be removed the day you want it removed. Hosting held in a supplier's account is a leash, whatever the intention behind it.

What happens if the site goes down?

Monitoring tells somebody within a couple of minutes, and that somebody is me if you are on the monthly arrangement. Static sites on a global network fail rarely, and when something does break it is usually DNS or a certificate rather than the site itself.

How often are backups taken, and have they been tested?

The site itself lives in a repository, so it can be rebuilt from source at any point. Content is backed up on a schedule, and the important part is that a restore is run once at handover rather than assumed. A backup nobody has ever restored is a filing cabinet nobody has ever opened.

Will moving hosting affect our search rankings?

Not if it is done properly. Same addresses, same content, a faster response, and no gap in availability. Where rankings suffer is a move that changes URLs without redirects, which is a different job and one covered on the migration pages.

Can you host it and bill us for it?

I would rather not, and it is worth saying why. Reselling hosting means a margin on a commodity and one more thing you cannot take with you. The account stays yours, the bill goes to you, and what you pay me for is the work.

Related

Tell me what you have now

Half an hour on a call, and a straight answer about whether this is the right job and whether I am the right person for it.

Book a callhello@breitloh.com