I was auditing our hosting platform this week and found a customer website that has been running for over 14 years, continuously, at over 99.9% uptime. It is a busy site too, and it has spent all of those years on our own managed servers. I am genuinely proud of that number, and it prompted this article, because there is a good chance you did not even know we do website hosting.
We do, and we have done for a long time. Quietly, reliably, and without drama, which is exactly how hosting should be. Here is what our managed website hosting actually is, who it suits, and why it might matter to your practice or business.
The 14-year website
First, the story. Every so often I go through our hosting platform properly, checking what is running, what needs attention, and what can be tidied up. This week I came across a site that first went live on our servers more than 14 years ago. It has been up ever since: through server upgrades, operating system migrations, and everything the internet has thrown at it. Over that whole period it has managed better than 99.9% uptime, and it is not a brochure site gathering dust, it gets real traffic every day.
No single trick achieves that. It is the boring, unglamorous stuff done consistently: decent hardware, monitoring, patching, backups, and someone paying attention. Which is a fair summary of how we approach everything else we do as well.
What our website hosting actually is
It is professional, commercial-grade cPanel hosting on servers in the UK, with fast bandwidth, full backups, and proper security. In plain terms:
- cPanel. The industry-standard control panel. Virtually every website designer and developer knows it and is happy working with it, which matters more than you might think (more on that below).
- UK servers. Your site is hosted here, close to your visitors, which helps with speed and keeps things simple from a data perspective.
- Fast bandwidth. Pages load quickly because the connectivity behind the servers is genuinely good, not the cheapest pipe available.
- Fully backed up. Regular backups, kept properly, so a mistake or a failure does not become a catastrophe. The same discipline we preach for practice backups applies to websites.
- Secure. The platform is maintained, monitored and patched by us, not left to fend for itself.
The managed option: keeping WordPress out of trouble
Standard hosting keeps the platform healthy. The optional fully managed service goes further: we keep an eye on the software running your site itself, WordPress being the obvious example, and make sure it stays patched and up to date.
Why does that matter? Because an out-of-date WordPress site is one of the most common ways websites get compromised. Old plugins and themes accumulate known vulnerabilities, and automated attacks scan the whole internet for them constantly, the same way practices are probed every day. A neglected site can end up hacked, hijacked, quietly serving malware to your visitors, or used for other nefarious purposes entirely, often without the owner noticing for months.
Most website designers are brilliant at design and much less interested in the ongoing patching grind. That is not a criticism, it is just not their job once the project ships. The managed option makes it somebody's job: ours.
Optional extra: a CDN in front of the whole site
For sites that want maximum speed and resilience, we can also put the entire site behind a content delivery network such as Cloudflare. That means visitors are served from a fast global edge network, the site stays quick under load, and the CDN absorbs a lot of nuisance traffic before it ever reaches the server. It also adds a useful layer of protection against downtime and other issues.
It is not compulsory, and plenty of sites do not need it. But when it fits, it is a very cost-effective upgrade.
We work with any website designer
This is the part I want to be clearest about. We are not a website design company and we do not want to be. Your designer carries on designing, building and updating your site exactly as they do now.
What we provide is the platform underneath. Because it is standard cPanel, virtually every designer will be familiar and comfortable with it from day one. They get the access they need, we look after the servers, backups and security, and you get one local, accountable team responsible for keeping the site up, the same way we already look after hosting, domains and email for many of our practices.
If you are choosing a host from scratch, our earlier guide to choosing the right website hosting covers what to look for in any provider. This article is simply me pointing out that we tick those boxes ourselves, and have the 14-year track record to show for it.
Who this suits
- Practices and businesses whose website hosting is a mystery: nobody is quite sure where it lives, who pays for it, or who patches it.
- Anyone whose site has been hacked, defaced or blacklisted before, or who worries it could be.
- Site owners who want UK hosting with a person to phone, rather than a ticket queue in another time zone.
- Designers who want a reliable, familiar cPanel platform for their clients, with someone else worrying about the servers.
To be clear and honest, as ever: no host can promise a site will never go down, and I will not pretend otherwise. What I can show you is what our platform has actually delivered, for over a decade, for a busy real-world site. Over 99.9% uptime across 14 years is not a marketing claim, it is a measurement.
Want your website on boring, reliable hosting?
If you do not know where your website lives, or you would like it somewhere with a track record like that, get in touch. We will take a look at your current setup, talk to your designer if you have one, and move the site over with minimal fuss. Then, with any luck, you will never have to think about it again. That is rather the point.