How We Handle Hosting, Domains and Email
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Ownership first, convenience second
Your domain, hosting, DNS and email should all be in accounts you own, on your billing details. We get access as a collaborator, and that access can be revoked in one click if you ever want it to be.
It is slightly less convenient for us. It is the only arrangement that is fair, and clients who have been through the alternative rarely need convincing.
If leaving your agency requires their cooperation to keep your own website online, you do not have a supplier. You have a landlord.
The domain especially
Domains registered by agencies in their own name are common and indefensible. We have helped several clients recover domains from suppliers they had fallen out with, and the process is slow, undignified and occasionally expensive.
- Registered to your company, with your details as the registrant
- Auto-renew on, with your card — not a card that will expire when someone leaves
- Registrar lock enabled
- Renewal reminders to a shared inbox, not one person's
- Two people internally with access
What we recommend for hosting
| Site type | Typical hosting | Rough monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Static or brochure site | Static host or CDN | £0–£15 |
| WordPress | Managed WordPress host | £20–£60 |
| Web application | Managed platform or a small VPS | £25–£150 |
| High traffic or regulated | Cloud with proper architecture | £150+ |
Most businesses are over-provisioned. We have moved plenty of sites from a £180-a-month arrangement to a £25 one with better performance, because the previous setup was sized for traffic that never arrived.
Email is not hosting
Keep them separate. Email on your website's hosting means a site problem becomes an email problem, and website hosts are not email specialists.
Use a dedicated provider, and get the authentication records right — SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Configured properly, your mail arrives; configured wrongly, it silently lands in spam and you find out weeks later from a customer who says they emailed twice.
What we set up on every project
- HTTPS with auto-renewing certificates
- Automated backups, off the server, with a documented restore
- Uptime monitoring that alerts a person
- Error tracking, so problems are reported rather than discovered
- A staging environment for changes
- Email authentication records, verified by sending a real test
Who fixes it at 2am
Decide before you need to know. With a support retainer, us — with a defined response time. Without one, we respond during working hours and there is no pretence otherwise.
What we always leave you is the ability to get help from anyone: standard technology, documented setup, accounts in your name. The worst position after a supplier relationship ends is a system only they could touch, and we make sure that is never the arrangement.
Frequently asked questions
Can you manage hosting for us?
What if we want to move away from you?
Do you resell hosting?
Our current agency owns our domain. What do we do?
Planning a website or a web application?
Tell us what it needs to do and who for. We will tell you which of the four kinds of project it actually is, and what that costs.
Related services
What we build for problems like this one