Hosting & charges explained

The ‘hosting for dummies’ guide: When you launch a website, it has to live somewhere on the internet – basically another computer, or server, connected to the network, which is publicly available 24/7.

Website hosting is big business. There are hundreds of companies who work solely to provide hosting, running enormous data centres which can host millions of sites. Further down the food chain, the majority of smaller web design agencies hire ‘shared’ hosting space from these data centres, usually paying a fixed price to host any number of websites and email, and letting the data centre deal with the complex stuff.

Creatomatic don’t do this. Instead, we hire dedicated servers in a UK-based data centre, which we manage ourselves.

Why? Because large-scale shared hosting is unreliable: if things go wrong, you’re often at the mercy of a tech support team who can take hours or even days to respond with thousands of issues being dealt with on a daily basis.

Furthermore, we know exactly what’s on each of our servers, meaning the chances of your business’ website sharing an IP address with something unsavoury are slim to none.

Creatomatic run several servers, named after pioneers of science and technology.  Each server runs at no more than 70% of capacity at any given time; they’re monitored 24/7 by our data centre and ourselves, using an alert system which runs health checks. If something goes wrong, we’re on-hand to fix it.

Each of Creatomatic’s servers operate on a RAID array. Each hard drive is mirrored onto a secondary backup drive as a first line of defence in the event of disk failure.

Alongside this, each account is backed up on the server on a daily basis. Each backup is copied the following day to off-site, externally based cloud storage systems, where they’re stored for a fortnight. Finally, we also make offline backups which can be stored for up to a year.

From time to time, issues crop up with servers which need to be managed. We do this as part of the service to our clients, so you don’t have to worry about it.

For instance: In 2017, Google announced that non-secure sites (http instead of https) would be marked with a ‘This website is not secure’ alert in Chrome. We put together an internal strategy and spent the next couple of weeks upgrading all our hosting client sites to use https – without any work required from any client.

We actively monitor security channels to ensure that WordPress updates are automatically installed, and monitor all accounts for insecure plugins or activity which suggests an account may have been compromised.

Whenever we have to provide maintenance which may lead to a disruption in service, we schedule this outside of working hours to ensure minimal issues or downtime for clients – typically working nightshifts and running updates in the early hours of the morning.

Finally, we look after client domain names, registrations, contacts, and DNS (the process which connects yourdomain.com to our server, plus email and related online services). You don’t have to worry about renewing domain names, or ensuring DNS records are valid, because we manage the whole process for you.