What is ‘managed hosting’ and how does it differ from a standard hosting offering? With standard web hosting, a host sells space and bandwidth on their servers – everything else is left to the site owner. For Wordpress sites, that means updating plugins, themes, and the Wordpress core, and ensuring backups run. Not doing these things can leave sites vulnerable to being hacked or risking data loss. Yet many sites haven’t been updated or backed up in months or years.

With managed hosting, I host the site and perform these critical activities. I package these offerings because it ensures that I can offer highly secure and responsive servers with clean IP reputations. In fact, I have a policy that sites must be able to be kept up to date and run supported versions of Wordpress and PHP to be hosted. As a site owner, you might not have any idea what these terms mean – and that’s why you want someone skilled in supporting Wordpress managing your site.

I’ve heard plenty of horror stories from those who have had sites hacked and lost data or worse. To date not a single site on my servers have been compromised because of the rigorous security practices and policies I put in place.

Is there a risk in my hosting being dependent on a single individual?

This is a great question that I’m glad my clients ask. Every client, whether they directly update their site or not, should have an administrative login to their site. Wordpress is a widespread, open source platform – hand those credentials over to any other developer or web host and they can migrate your site over to another hosting platform. It is critical to have this access – what if you become dissatisfied with your current provider or the relationship sours? Without administrative access, your provider can hold your site hostage (and I’ve been involved in a few delicate negotiations of this sort for clients in the past – so it does happen).

If someone happened to me, the servers would still stay online as they are professionally managed by major server management companies (such as Hivelocity) and paid for a year in advance, with auto renewal set up. Using a professional management company also ensures they stay online while I sleep or travel.

Do you host sites that you don’t develop or maintain?

Yes – however the site must be able to run a currently supported version of PHP and plugins and themes must be up to date and have no open security vulnerabilities. I’m happy to review and update your site (at my hourly rate) ahead of migration if it does not meet this criteria.

Do you offer refunds or am I locked into a year?

Although I require clients to pay for a year of hosting upfront, the amount of fully refundable.

Is there an uptime guarantee?

Yes – there is a 99.9% uptime guarantee. If the server your site sits on is offline more than 0.1% in any calendar month, your hosting fee for that month will be credited back to you.

Does the hosting cost include making updates or changes to my site?

No, it does not. Typically I bill such changes at my hourly rate, but I can also set up packages where clients pay a set monthly fee for content updates or new development. Contact me for details.

Do you host sites other than Wordpress?

While my offerings are Wordpress-focused, I am open to hosting other sites. Please contact me to see if I can meet your needs.