Hosting, Domain & Maintenance

We register or point your domain, install the SSL certificate, host the site or system, and keep it working. It is the least glamorous thing we sell and the one that decides whether everything else was worth buying.

What "maintained" actually means

A website is not a finished object. It is a thing running on a computer, on a network, behind a certificate, in browsers that change every few weeks. Left alone, it does not stay the same — it degrades.

The failures are boringly predictable:

• The certificate expires and every visitor is shown a red security warning. This one is entirely preventable and still happens constantly.
• The domain lapses, because the renewal notice went to an address nobody reads any more. Recovering it ranges from awkward to impossible.
• The platform ages out. The framework it was built on stops receiving security fixes, and one day the site is a liability rather than an asset.
• Something breaks quietly. A form stops sending, an image stops loading on phones, a page starts returning an error to Google. Nobody notices, because nobody is looking — and by definition the people who hit it are the ones who never became customers.

Maintenance is not "we will fix it if you call". It is that someone is responsible before you have to.

What we cover

Domain. Registered by us or pointed from wherever you already own it. Renewals handled — this is the single cheapest disaster to prevent.

SSL. Installed, renewed, and enforced so the site is served over HTTPS, which browsers now require and search engines expect.

Hosting. On infrastructure we run, tuned for the platform rather than generic shared space.

Updates. Framework, security patches and the platform itself. Not optional and not billed as an event.

Accountability. When something breaks there is a person to call, and that person can change the code.

Improvements arrive without you buying them

Every site we host runs on the same platform we build and maintain. Nine live sites today — each with its own content, colours, menus and features, all served by one system.

That means improvement is not a project you commission. When we make the platform better, every site we host gets it, on the same day, at no additional cost and with nothing to authorise.

A recent and specific example. In one week this month the platform gained canonical link tags, an automatic social-sharing image, a per-page title mechanism that had been silently broken for a long time, and a corrected robots.txt. All nine sites received all four the same day. Sites built individually from templates would have needed nine separate pieces of work — and would almost certainly have received none of it, because nobody commissions work to fix a problem they cannot see.

This is the argument for a maintained platform over a site handed over and forgotten, and it is easier to demonstrate than to explain: the page you are reading got those improvements the same way your site would.

What it costs to have nobody responsible

The usual arrangement — a site built once, handed over, and left — has a predictable ending. Two or three years in, the developer is unreachable, nobody knows where the domain is registered, the login has been lost, and the honest advice is to rebuild from scratch.

The money spent on that first site is not partially recovered. It is gone, along with whatever search-engine standing the domain had accumulated.

Continuity is worth more than it looks. A site that has been running, maintained and current for years is treated differently by search engines and by the customer checking whether you are still trading, than one that appeared last month.

Already have a site somebody abandoned?

Common, and fixable more often than people expect. We take over existing sites: work out where the domain and hosting actually are, get control of them back into your name, assess whether what exists is worth keeping, and either maintain it or move it onto our platform.

The first step is usually just finding out what you own, which is a conversation rather than a project.

Talk to us

Tell us what you have — a domain, a site, a system somebody built, or nothing yet — and we will tell you what keeping it running involves.

Get in touch, or see how we build the sites in the first place.