Hosting & Care

What hosting actually is

Your website is a set of files. Those files have to sit on a computer that is switched on all the time and connected to the internet, so that when someone types your address the files can be sent to them. Renting space on that computer is hosting.

Your domain — the address itself, like yourbusiness.ca — is separate, and it is registered in your name. Nobody can hold it hostage, including me.

Because your site is just finished files rather than software that has to run, hosting it is cheap and reliable. There is no database to fall over and nothing that needs restarting.

What “care” covers

The looking-after half, which is the part most people actually want:

• Content edits — new prices, new hours, a new service, seasonal changes. You email me, I do it.
• Weekly backups — so a mistake is a five-minute fix rather than a disaster
• Security and updates — keeping everything current
• Uptime monitoring — I find out if your site goes down, rather than you finding out from a customer
• Support — a person who knows your site, rather than a helpdesk queue

Two ways to pay for it

If you are on the Website Plan at $175 a month, all of this is already included — hosting, unlimited edits, updates and support are the point of the plan, and there is nothing else to buy.

If you bought a one-time build, hosting through me is $25 a month, month to month. Edits are an optional $50 a month on top if you would rather not do them yourself. You are also free to host it anywhere you like — it is your code, and I will help you move it.

Do you actually need a care plan?

Not necessarily, and I would rather say so than sell you something you will not use.

Because these sites are plain files with no software running underneath, one can sit untouched for years without breaking. There is no platform pushing updates you have to keep up with and nothing that expires. If your prices never change, your hours never change and you have no intention of adding anything, hosting alone at $25 a month is a perfectly sensible choice.

Where a care plan earns its keep is when the site needs to keep up with the business — seasonal pricing, a service you have added, a new area you have started covering, photos of a job you are proud of. A site that gets updated is a site that keeps ranking; one that has not changed since it launched slowly slides.

If something goes wrong

Uptime monitoring means an automated check loads your site every few minutes and alerts me if it stops responding. The point is that I hear about a problem before you do, and long before a customer does.

Weekly backups mean there is always a recent copy of the whole site. If a change turns out to be wrong, or something is deleted by accident, putting it back is a few minutes' work rather than a rebuild.

In practice, outages on a static site are almost always the hosting company's problem rather than the site's, and they are rare and short. There is no database to corrupt and no software to crash — which is most of the reason this arrangement is cheap.

What happens when you need a change

You email or text me what you want changed. Small edits — a price, a phone number, some new copy, a photo swap — are usually done the same day or the next one. Larger changes, like a whole new page, get quoted first so there are no surprises.

There is one boundary worth stating plainly: if a change would seriously hurt the site's speed or make it harder for people with disabilities to use, I will say so and suggest another way of getting what you want. That is what you are paying someone to know.