Managed hosting for the sites we build
Hosting is cheap and unmanaged hosting is expensive. The difference is who notices when the disk fills up, the certificate expires, or the PHP version the site runs on stops being supported.
What “managed” means here
Unmanaged hosting sells you a server. You are then responsible for updates, backups, certificates, PHP versions, monitoring and recovery — which is fine if someone at your company owns that, and is how most sites end up compromised when nobody does.
Managed hosting means those are our job rather than yours. You have one number to call when something is wrong, and the person who answers it has access to the site, the server and the code, so the conversation does not begin with three suppliers deciding whose problem it is.
That last point is the whole argument. Most hosting incidents are not resolved slowly because the problem is hard. They are resolved slowly because the host, the developer and the domain registrar are three different companies.
What is included
Every site we host gets all of it. There is no tier where backups are an extra.
- Backups
- Daily, off-site, kept for 30 days. Files and database together, so a restore returns a working site rather than half of one. Restores are on request and there is no charge for asking.
- Monitoring
- Uptime checked every five minutes from outside the network, plus certificate expiry, disk, and PHP error rates. An alert reaches a person, not a dashboard nobody opens.
- Updates
- WordPress core, plugins and themes applied monthly, on staging first, with a check that the site still works before it goes to production. Security releases go on sooner and out of cycle.
- PHP
- Kept on a version that still receives security support, and moved with notice and a staging test rather than overnight.
- SSL
- Provisioned and renewed automatically. An expired certificate is a monitored event here, not a Monday-morning discovery.
- Staging
- One staging environment per site, a copy of production, for testing changes before anyone else sees them.
- DNS and deliverability records — SPF, DKIM, DMARC — configured and kept correct. Mailboxes themselves are not hosted here; we will set them up with your provider.
- Support hours
- The same hours and the same response commitments as our support agreement. Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 20:00 UK time.
The specification
The part most hosting pages leave to adjectives.
- Location
- UK data centres. Your site and its backups stay in the UK.
- Platform
- Cloud infrastructure with SSD storage throughout, sized per site rather than bought as one plan and divided up.
- Isolation
- Each site runs in its own environment with its own resources. No shared-server neighbour can take yours down or read anything of yours.
- Scaling
- Resources are raised for a campaign or a season and lowered again afterwards. A traffic spike is a phone call, not a migration.
- Security
- Firewall, forced HTTPS, hardened file permissions, no shared credentials, and access logged per person.
- Uptime
- We do not publish an uptime percentage, because the number every host publishes is not the thing you want. What we commit to is that we find out before you do, and that the person who answers the phone can fix it.
Who this is for, and who it is not
This is for you ifthe site matters to the business, nobody internally owns keeping it running, and you would rather one supplier were accountable for the site and the server together.
This is not for you ifyou have an internal team who already run infrastructure, or if the site is small, static and genuinely fine on a five-pound-a-month account. We will say so rather than move it.
Hosting comes with a build or a support agreement.It is not sold as a server on its own, because a server on its own is the thing that goes wrong quietly. If you want us to host a site somebody else built, that is a support conversation and it starts with a look at the code.
We are not the cheapest hosting you can buy and we are not trying to be. There is no version of this service that competes with a shared hosting account on price, and we would rather say that here than have the conversation after you have compared invoices.
Moving an existing site to us
Migration of the site itself is part of setting up hosting: files, database, certificates, DNS and email records, with the switch scheduled at a time that suits you and the old environment kept running until the new one is verified.
If the site also needs work to be maintainable once it is here, that is separate and quoted separately — you will know before it moves, not after. See CMS migration.
Questions we get asked
Do we have to host with you to work with you?
No. Every site we build runs on standard hosting and you are free to put it anywhere. Hosting is a convenience we offer, not a condition of the build.
Is hosting sold on its own?
It comes with a build or with a support agreement. Hosting without support is a server with nobody watching it, which is the problem this service exists to solve — so we do not sell it that way.
Do you host sites you did not build?
Yes, after a short technical review — an hour or so looking at the code, the plugins and the state of the updates. If it needs work before it is safe to run, we will tell you what and quote it separately. If it does not, it moves as it is.
What happens when the site goes down?
Monitoring pages us, usually before anyone reports it. An outage is a time-sensitive issue under our SLA, so it is picked up immediately during coverage hours — and always within 2 hours. You are told what happened and what was done about it, in writing, once it is fixed.
Can we leave?
Yes, and you take the site with you — files, database and configuration. There is no part of it that only runs here.
Is support included?
Hosting keeps the site running. Changes to the site are support and maintenance, which is a separate agreement. Where the boundary sits is written into both.
Start a project
Tell us what needs hosting and where it is now.
Or email us at hello@felixwebsolutions.com.
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