Infrastructure support: managed
hosting & website maintenance

Infrastructure support covers seven service areas, each with its own dedicated page on this site. Managed web hosting for shared environments. Managed VPS hosting for sites that have outgrown shared. Dedicated email hosting. Domain registration and DNS management. Website and app maintenance for ongoing updates and care. Website migration when moving between hosts or platforms. Security and speed optimisation for performance work.

You can use one service standalone (just hosting, just maintenance) or bundle multiple under our website support packages. Most clients use at least the hosting plus a maintenance package; larger sites add speed optimisation and the dedicated email hosting layer. The service breakdown gives you the pricing and scope of each individual piece.

Hosting is the infrastructure your site runs on: the server, the database, the network connection, the backup storage. Maintenance is the human work that keeps the site healthy on top of that infrastructure: WordPress updates, plugin updates, security patching, database optimisation, monitoring for broken links and security issues. They’re different things, sold separately, often used together.

Some clients host with us but maintain the site themselves (or with their in-house developer). Some clients host elsewhere and just use our maintenance packages on top. Most clients use both because the value compounds: hosting plus maintenance from the same team means one phone call when something breaks, instead of three vendors pointing at each other. Pricing for each is on the individual hosting and maintenance pages.

99.9% uptime in our managed hosting packages, measured annually. That works out to roughly 8 hours and 45 minutes of allowed downtime per year, including planned maintenance windows. We schedule maintenance windows in advance and avoid peak traffic periods where possible. For most business websites, the actual uptime tracks closer to 99.95% or higher in any given year, but we don’t commit to that in writing because we won’t promise what we can’t guarantee.

If you need a higher uptime guarantee (99.99% or better) for genuinely critical infrastructure, that’s a different kind of hosting setup with dedicated failover and round-the-clock incident response. We can build it but it costs significantly more and most websites don’t need it. The honest answer for most business sites is that 99.9% is plenty.

Our hosting partners’ data centres are based in the Netherlands and Germany by default. We use providers whose facilities hold ISO 27001 and PCI-DSS certifications. To be precise: we don’t own data centres ourselves. We rent capacity from providers who do this professionally and at a scale we couldn’t match.

For clients with specific data residency requirements (other EU regions, the US, or Switzerland for some compliance contexts), we can move infrastructure to a partner with the relevant footprint. Worth discussing in the discovery phase before hosting gets set up. For GDPR specifically, EU-based hosting is the default for any client with EU users, regardless of where your business is registered.

Backups run automatically on a schedule that depends on your hosting package. Entry-level shared hosting includes daily backups with 7-day retention. Higher-tier and VPS packages include up to 8 backups per day with longer retention. All backups include the file system, the database, and the configuration. Backups get stored off-site so a single data centre incident doesn’t take both the live site and the backups down.

Restoring from a backup typically takes between 30 minutes and a few hours depending on the size of the site and the type of restore (full site versus single file or database). For maintenance packages, restores are covered by the included support hours. We can’t guarantee zero data loss, no hosting setup can, but the backup frequency and retention can recover from most realistic failure scenarios: site hack, plugin conflict, accidental content deletion, database corruption.

Yes. Our website maintenance packages work on top of any hosting provider, not just ours. Care (4 hours per month, 24 working-hour response), Growth (8 hours per month, 8-hour response) and Partnership (16 hours per month, 4-hour response) cover the maintenance work regardless of where the site is hosted. Pricing starts at €240 per month, three-month minimum term, then monthly cancellable with one month notice.

The trade-off: if hosting and maintenance sit with separate vendors, incident response is slightly more complex because we have to coordinate with your hosting provider when server-level issues come up. With both under us, response is faster. For most clients the convenience of one vendor outweighs the slight cost difference. But it’s not a requirement, and we won’t pressure you to switch hosting if your current setup works.

Hosting upgrades happen incrementally. Most clients start on shared hosting and move to managed VPS when traffic, database size, or performance requirements push past what shared can handle. The upgrade path is planned: we move the site to the new infrastructure during a maintenance window, test on staging, then cut over to production. URL structures and email setup stay the same. You don’t lose data, you don’t change addresses, the migration is mostly invisible to users.

Higher-tier needs (dedicated VPS, cloud hosting on AWS or GCP, multi-region setups) work the same way. We discuss the threshold during quarterly reviews on our higher-tier packages, so the upgrade happens before the current hosting becomes a bottleneck. The earliest indicator is usually database query times creeping up, which we monitor. Worth flagging proactively rather than waiting for slow page loads to start hurting conversion rates.