Web hosting and website maintenance

What hosting management includes

Hosting management is not one service but several tasks running at once, mostly unnoticed. You see most of them only when they fail, so it helps to know what happens in the background and what you pay for.

Area	What it includes	When it shows
Choice of solution	Assessment of load, site type and expected growth	At the start and when traffic grows
Security	SSL certificate, system updates, protection against common attacks	During an attempted attack, when it is too late to start
Backups	Regular backups of the database and site files	After an error, an attack or a failed update
Monitoring	Watching availability and server response time	In an outage, when it matters who learns about it first
Updates	Server system and PHP version; the CMS and plug-ins belong to site maintenance, which we agree separately	Continuously; neglected updates are the most common cause of compromise
Migration	Moving a website, database and mailboxes	When you change provider or redesign

Hosting decides speed before the first image loads

When people tune site speed, they usually focus on images and scripts. That is the second step. The first is the time in which the server answers at all. If the answer takes a second, the whole page is a second late before anything is drawn, and no image optimisation catches up. Server response is the first item of the metric measuring when the main content appears, which is part of Core Web Vitals, so a site with excellent content can have poor numbers purely because it runs on an overloaded server.

Shared hosting, VPS and a managed solution

The difference between the types can be summed up in one sentence: how many strangers’ sites you share performance with, and who takes care of the server. Shared hosting is cheapest because many sites run on one machine, and when one gets a surge of visits all the others feel it. A VPS has dedicated resources and behaves predictably, but someone has to administer it. A managed solution combines dedicated performance with administration that you do not have to handle.

	Shared hosting	VPS	Managed solution
Performance	Shared with others	Dedicated	Dedicated
Stability under traffic	Low	High	High
Who administers the server	The provider	You or your supplier	The supplier
Skills required	None	High	None
When it fits	A small presentation site	A larger site with its own administrator	A shop or a site that should work without worry

How we choose hosting for a site

We choose according to how the site is really used: the number of visits, whether it is a presentation or a shop, how often the content changes and whether anything heavier than ordinary pages runs on it. Websites run on our own VPS in the EU in separate environments, and we choose the size of the plan according to the load. A small company site with a few hundred visits a month needs only the smallest plan, while a shop with thousands of products needs a larger one. If a project needs a separate machine, we say so and recommend a solution outside our server.

A backup is worth something only when it can be restored

Backups are where we most often meet a false sense of safety. The owner knows that backups are made, but nobody has tried whether the site can be restored from them. We keep copies in several places, not only on the server: besides the backups on the server, a copy goes weekly to a storage in our office, and several times a year to a disk that is physically disconnected from the network. Restoring a site from a backup and testing it are not automatic parts of hosting, we agree them with you as needed.

Updates are the cheapest form of security

Most compromised sites are outdated. Hosting keeps the server system and PHP up to date, and in general the newest version runs unless an older site cannot use it yet. The CMS, plug-ins and themes belong to site maintenance, which is agreed individually and most often goes together with building the site.

For agencies: white label delivery

Agencies use our hosting and maintenance as the regular care for the sites they deliver, so that clients have one contact, yours. We run the technical side in the background, never contact your client and agree responsibilities in writing. See white label services.

What hosting will not solve

Good hosting does not repair a slow or poorly built site, and it does not replace a restore test or a maintenance plan. We tell you when the problem is in the site and not in the server.

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