Managed hosting and business email
Website and email hosting without the technical chasing
We handle the setup, the migration, the certificates, the backups, the monitoring and the DNS, so there is one place to ring when your website or business email needs attention. And one person who already knows your setup.
From £24.99/moplus VAT. Migration £49 to £99. No long tie-in.
Manchester based, UK wide. Real people, and your domain stays in your name.
Hosting is fine until the day it is not, and then it is your problem
Nobody thinks about hosting when it works. It becomes visible on exactly one sort of day, and it is always a day you were busy with something else.
- The website is down and the hosting company's support is a form with a two-day response time.
- Email has stopped arriving and nobody can say whether it is the host, the domain or Microsoft.
- The person who set it all up left, or was somebody's nephew, and no one has the login.
- A certificate expired overnight and every visitor is now seeing a security warning.
- You are paying three different companies and each one says it is one of the others.
The failure is rarely technical. It is that nobody is accountable, so the problem becomes yours to project-manage on a day you had other plans.
What we are not going to pretend
We are not the cheapest place to put a website, and we are not going to compete on the things the big hosts win on. It is fairer to say that plainly than to bury it.
You can get hosting for a pound a month. You can get more storage and more bandwidth than we offer for less than we charge. The very large providers have data centres, automation and scale that a Manchester business is never going to match on price per gigabyte, and anybody claiming otherwise is being loose with the truth.
What you get from them for that price is a control panel and a knowledge base. Which is genuinely fine, if you know what a DNS record is, if you are comfortable deciding whether a PHP version bump will break your site, and if you have time to sit in a support queue when something goes wrong.
Most small business owners do not want to be their own IT department. That is the entire market we serve. You are not buying disk space from us, you are buying somebody who already knows how your setup is put together and picks up the phone.
The bit that actually costs you money
Cheap hosting is rarely expensive because of the fee. It is expensive because of the afternoon you spent on a support chat, the fortnight your contact form was silently broken, or the morning your email did not work and you had no idea who to ring.
Put an hourly value on your own time and the price difference between commodity hosting and managed hosting disappears the first time something goes wrong.
One provider, one number, no pointing
The most common mess we inherit is a business paying a domain registrar, a hosting company and an email provider separately, with a website built by somebody who has since disappeared. When anything breaks, each supplier can honestly say it is not their part.
We take responsibility for the whole thing. If it is the DNS, the host, the certificate or the mail routing, it is still our job to find out and fix it rather than tell you which company to ring next.
What managed actually includes
Managed is one of those words that means whatever the seller wants. Here is precisely what we do, so you can compare it with whoever else you are considering.
Setup and migration, done by us
Moving a site is the part people dread and it is genuinely fiddly, mostly because of email rather than the website. We plan it, do the switch at a quiet time, and keep both ends running until we are sure mail is flowing to the right place.
You do not need to understand nameservers, MX records or propagation. That is the whole point of paying somebody.
Updates and certificates
Software updates get applied promptly rather than whenever somebody remembers, because the gap between a patch being published and being exploited is short. Certificates renew automatically and we check that they actually did.
An expired certificate is one of the few faults that turns every visitor away instantly, and it is entirely preventable.
Backups that have been restored
Everybody sells backups. Rather fewer test them. A backup nobody has ever restored is a hope, not a plan, and the day you find out is a bad day to find out.
We take them daily on the business plans and we test restores rather than assuming.
Monitoring, including the form
Uptime monitoring is standard everywhere. Form monitoring is not, and it is the one we care most about, because a contact form that quietly stops delivering has no symptoms at all. The site looks perfect and simply appears to have stopped answering.
We check that yours still sends, because we once discovered our own had not been for longer than we would like to admit.
Email that is set up properly
Mailboxes, aliases, forwarding, and the authentication records that decide whether your mail lands in an inbox or a spam folder. That last part is invisible and is the reason plenty of small businesses quietly have deliverability problems they have never diagnosed.
If you would rather run email on Microsoft 365, we will set that up and point everything at it instead. We are not precious about it.
Why we can say this with a straight face
We learned this one by deleting our own configuration
A story we are not especially proud of. Our own deployment process once wiped a server-only configuration file, because a sync command was set up to mirror a folder exactly and nobody had thought hard enough about what "exactly" would do to a file that existed only on the server.
The site went down. Not for long, because we noticed quickly, but the cause took longer to find than the fix did, and the reason it took long was that the knowledge lived in one person's head rather than anywhere useful.
The same category of problem bit us again later, in a quieter way. A verification file for a search tool sat on the server outside our repository, got removed by the same mechanism, and our search reporting silently stopped for weeks. Nothing broke. There was no error. It simply stopped, and nobody noticed because nothing announces that sort of failure.
Both of those are now impossible by design rather than by memory: anything that must survive a deployment lives in the code, and the things that fail silently are monitored rather than trusted. That is what we mean by managed hosting. Not a bigger disk. Somebody who has already made the expensive mistakes and built the guardrails afterwards.
Everything we watch on a client site is something that once went wrong on ours, usually in a way that made no noise at all.
Read the whole storyThe five things that break, and what we do about each
Across every site we have ever looked after, the faults fall into the same small set. None of them are exotic. All of them are preventable if somebody is actually watching.
Out of date software
By a distance the most common cause of a hacked small business site. Automated scanners sweep the web looking for known holes in old versions and take whatever they find. They do not care whether you are a multinational or a one-van plumber, and being small is not protection.
We apply updates promptly and test that the site still works afterwards, which is the step that gets skipped when people update in a hurry.
Expired certificates
A certificate lapses and every visitor gets a full-page security warning. Almost all of them leave immediately, and a fair few will assume you have been hacked. Meanwhile the business owner has no idea because their browser cached the old one.
Renewals are automatic and we verify them, rather than trusting that automatic means reliable.
Silent form failures
The one with no symptoms. A hosting change, a plugin update or a mail configuration tweak stops the contact form delivering. The page still looks perfect. Enquiries simply stop, and because nobody complains about a form they filled in, you find out weeks later if at all.
We monitor form delivery on the business plans. It is the check we would keep if we could only keep one.
Email deliverability
Your mail starts landing in spam folders, usually after a change somewhere in DNS or because the authentication records were never set up properly in the first place. Nobody tells you. You just notice that customers have stopped replying.
We set the records up correctly at migration and check them when anything changes.
Nobody knowing where anything is
Not technically a fault, but it turns a ten-minute problem into a three-day one. The domain is registered to a personal email nobody uses, the hosting is under an old employee's name, and the site was built by a company that no longer exists.
Part of taking over is documenting all of it, in your name, written down somewhere you can get at without us.
Hosting and email pricing
All prices plus VAT. Annual payment is available on the standard plan. Migration from your current provider is £49 to £99 depending on what we are moving.
Managed Hosting
£24.99/mo
One business website that needs looking after
- One website
- SSL certificate managed
- Backups
- Basic uptime monitoring
- Hosting support from a person
- One mailbox
- Annual payment option
Business Hosting
£49/mo
A team that relies on its email as much as its website
- Up to five mailboxes
- Daily backups with tested restores
- Uptime and performance monitoring
- DNS management
- Contact form monitoring
- Security checks
- Up to thirty minutes support each month
Connected Hosting
£79/mo
Hosting that also captures and tracks your enquiries
- Everything in Business Hosting
- Smart enquiry form
- Lead dashboard
- Automatic customer acknowledgement
- Website analytics
- Three users
Hosting is not where we make our money and we are relaxed about saying so. It is the service that keeps everything else working, and it is often how a business first finds out whether we are any good to deal with.
Moving to us, step by step
Migration is the bit people put off for years. It is genuinely routine when somebody who has done it before is driving.
First we look at what you actually have, which is frequently not what anybody thinks. Where the domain is registered, who controls the nameservers, where the site is hosted, where mail is delivered, and whether there are old records pointing at services nobody uses any more.
Then we copy the site and set it up on our infrastructure without touching anything live, so we can test it properly before a single customer is affected. Email is prepared in parallel, because email is where migrations go wrong.
The switch itself happens at a quiet time, usually in the evening or at a weekend. We keep the old setup available while DNS updates propagate, so there is no window where mail can be lost. Then we watch it for a few days rather than declaring victory immediately.
You keep your domain in your own name throughout. We will manage it for you, but we will not take ownership of it, because a supplier holding your domain is a hostage situation waiting to happen. We have had to help two businesses recover domains from former suppliers, and both times it took weeks and a great deal of goodwill that nobody should have needed to spend.
Frequently asked questions
Is this cheaper than the big hosting companies?
No, and we would rather say so. They win on price per gigabyte and always will. What you are paying for here is somebody accountable who knows your setup, does the updates and picks up the phone. If you are comfortable managing hosting yourself, a large provider is a perfectly sensible choice.
Do I have to have my website built by you?
No. We host and look after sites we did not build, and that is a good chunk of what we do. If it is built on something we cannot properly support we will tell you before taking your money rather than afterwards.
What happens if I want to leave?
You take everything and go. The domain is already yours, we hand over the site files and databases, and we will talk to your new provider if it helps. No exit fee and no hostage-taking. We would rather you left cleanly and spoke well of us.
Do you do Microsoft 365 email?
Yes. Some businesses need it for Teams, shared calendars or because a client insists. We will set it up and point everything at it. Our own mailboxes and a lot of our clients run on simpler hosted email, which is cheaper and perfectly adequate for most.
What counts as support?
Anything to do with the site, the hosting, the email or the domain. Fixing what is broken, changing a mailbox, updating a DNS record, working out why a message bounced. Building new sections of a website is a separate piece of work rather than support.
How quickly do you respond?
Site down or email not working gets dealt with straight away. Everything else is usually the same working day. We are a small team and you will be talking to somebody who knows your setup rather than a queue.
Will moving my site cause any downtime?
It should not, and it has not for anybody we have moved. The site is copied and tested on our end before anything changes, and the switch is a DNS change rather than a gap. The bit that needs care is email, because messages arriving mid-switch have to land somewhere sensible. We keep both ends live until we are certain mail is flowing correctly, which is why we do it in the evening rather than mid-morning.
What if my site is built on something unusual?
Tell us what it is and we will be honest about whether we can support it properly. We would rather turn work away than take on a platform we cannot look after, because the whole promise here is that somebody who understands your setup answers the phone. If we are guessing, that promise is worthless and you will find out at the worst moment.
Do you handle the domain renewal as well?
We will remind you and we will manage it if you want, but the registration stays in your name with you as the legal owner. Expired domains are one of the more painful ways a small business can lose a week, usually because the renewal notice went to an email address nobody has checked since 2019. Part of taking you on is making sure that address is one you actually read.
Questions worth asking whoever hosts you now
Whether you move to us or not, these are the questions that tell you where you actually stand. Most people have never asked any of them.
Who owns the domain? Not who manages it, who is the registrant. If the answer is your web designer, your marketing agency or a company that has since closed, that is worth sorting out this month regardless of anything else. A domain in somebody else's name is the one problem that can genuinely hold a business to ransom.
When was the last backup restored? Not taken, restored. Anybody can produce a list of backup files. The question is whether one has ever been put back successfully, because that is the only test that counts and it is the one nobody runs.
Who applies the software updates, and how quickly? If the answer is that the hosting company handles the server and you handle the website, make sure you know which half is yours. That gap is where most hacked sites live.
What happens when a customer says the contact form is not working? If there is no way to know except somebody telling you, then you are relying on a customer being bothered enough to ring and complain about a form they filled in. Most will not.
How long does it take to get a human? Not an autoresponder or a ticket number. An actual person who can look at your specific setup. If you have never tested this, you will discover the answer on the worst possible day.
If your current provider answers all five well, stay where you are. We would rather tell you that than move a business that had nothing wrong with it.
Where this connects
Hosting keeps the foundations solid. These are the things built on top of it.
- Connected websitesIf you need the site itself building rather than just hosting.
- Lead capture and follow-upTurning the enquiries your site produces into tracked opportunities.
- AI website chatAnswering visitor questions on the site we are hosting for you.
- Content and campaignsBringing people to the site in the first place.
- Microsoft 365 and IT supportIf your email and devices need looking after as well.
- Is your website quietly falling apart?The fifteen-minute self-check, including the faults that make no noise.
Tell us what you are running now
Most people are not entirely sure who hosts what, and that is fine. Give us the website address and we can work most of it out, then tell you honestly whether moving is worth the bother.
All prices plus VAT. Your domain stays in your name.