Self-hosted
Hosting your own website will mean that you can pick your own hosting company. People often do this to take advantage of lower cost hosting. There are drawbacks to low cost hosting that we understand and as such we only use Premium WordPress Hosting.
Having said this, you are free to make your own choice and we will build your website for you on your chosen hosting, but we will have to charge you an hourly fee for any support after the build is complete.
We can provide support on an ad hoc basis at our maintenance and support rate.
What’s the benefit in self-hosted?
There are none, however, it means you can still have us build your website even if you choose not to use our hosting.
Hosted by Us
We only use premium WordPress hosting. We have had experience of using low cost hosting to provide customers cheap hosting, but frankly the experience was not good. Some of the low cost hosting options are appalling and we now only use the best we can afford. Currently, we use WP Engine.
Websites hosted by us get:-
- A hosting environment run & maintained by experts
- Fast loading websites using the latest caching techniques
- Enterprise grade hosting security with real time threat detection
- Security audits and code reviews
- Enterprise grade infrastructure that is scalable
- Daily backups
- Managed core software updates (does not include plugins)
- Very high uptime
- Help & support using your website software
- First 15 minutes free for plugin troubleshooting
- Additions, troubleshooting and fixing at favourable hourly rates
- Email support with 24 hour response
What’s the benefit in hosting with us?
It means you have the best possible hosting for your website and a good level of support.
Hosted by us + Maintenance Agreement
Your website can run trouble free for years or not. It is like owning a car, you can neglect the regular maintenance and have very few troubles or you can have a major problem. With most people, they can’t have their car off the road so have regular maintenance to reduce the risk of a major failure.
You can look at a website in a similar way and if you don’t want to risk your website not working properly, you should have regular maintenance carried out.
You may be wondering why this is needed on top of the hosting we offer, especially as we talk so highly about it. The simple answer is that your website also uses plugins to provide the functionality that it does. In most cases, plugins should carry on working without issue, however, as the web evolves and websites have to do so much more, including working on mobiles, being secure and being fast enough to keep Google happy then the continued flawless operation of plugins can not be guaranteed by us or anyone else.
WordPress is open source and although the core software is regulated and kept up to date, the millions of plugins are not and this is down to the plugin developer to keep their plugins up-to-date. As developers, we are very keen to only use plugins we trust, and try to keep the number as low as possible to keep possibilities of future problems low. The problem is, we are at the mercy of plugin developers and while plugin issues can be often be resolved quickly, sometimes they can’t and they can take hours, days or weeks to fix in some cases. Clearly, we have to charge for such time intensive troubleshooting and this means downtime on your website too.
The maintenance agreement helps avoid this as we build up a budget and maintain your plugins every 6-8 weeks to reduce the risk of a major failure. Your maintenance payments are always covering this and any changes we have to make to your website as we service it.
You get everything you get included above in the Hosted by Us section however, as you are budgeting monthly for fixes and maintenance you get additional help :-
- Priority support by text or phone
- Fixes to plugin issues at favourable hourly rates
- Regular plugin updates and website maintenance
What’s the benefit in hosting with us plus maintenance package?
It means you have the best possible hosting for your website and a budget in place to fix unexpected problems as they arise. It also means that your websites plugins are updated regularly and any maintenance that is needed is carried out and logged.
Maintenance and Support Rates
Our hourly rates are as follows: –
- Self-hosted websites – £60 +VAT per hour
- Hosted with us – £45 +VAT per hour
- Hosted with us + maintenance package – £35 +VAT per hour