Hosting
Managed hosting on our own servers, set up, monitored and updated by the same team that built the site.
Talk to us about hostingCheap hosting is only cheap until the morning it is not.
Shared hosting puts your site on a machine with hundreds of others, and when one of them is attacked or simply busy, yours slows down with it. Support is a ticket queue, the person answering has never seen your site, and nobody there knows what it was built to do. We host the sites we build on servers we provision and run ourselves, so when something is wrong there is one team to call and that team already knows the codebase.
DigitalOcean machines we provision and tune, not space resold from somebody else.
A new version is built alongside the running one and switched over, so nobody sees a broken page.
Certificates issued and renewed without anyone having to remember, because that is how they lapse.
Held somewhere other than the server they came from, so a lost server is not a lost site.
The same stack as production, so a change is tried somewhere real before it goes live.
We are told when a site goes down or an error starts repeating, usually before you notice.
Who it is for
Tick anything that sounds familiar.
What it runs on
No mystery about where your site lives or who has the keys.
The machines sit in DigitalOcean's London region, so your data stays in the UK and the trip to and from Northern Ireland is a short one. We size the server to the site rather than putting everything on one box and hoping.
Forge builds the server to a known configuration every time, which means no hand-edited box that only one person understands. Nginx, PHP, MySQL and the certificates are all set up the same way across every site we run.
A change is committed, and the server pulls, builds and switches to it on its own. The new version goes up beside the old one and the swap happens at the end, so there is no window where a visitor sees a site mid-update.
The team that wrote the site is the team with server access. Nothing gets handed to a support desk that has never seen your code, and there is no argument about whether it is a hosting problem or a website problem.
You get the approach, what is in, what is out, a timeline and a price before anything starts. No hourly rate quietly running in the background.
How much of it is bespoke, how many systems it has to talk to, and how much content needs moving across. We will tell you which of those is driving the cost.
A monthly plan covering updates, backups and small changes, priced separately so you can see exactly what the ongoing commitment is.
Both Kyle and Luke took the time to listen to our requirements and provided valuable insights throughout the development process. The end result exceeded our expectations, providing a seamless and efficient booking experience for our customers while streamlining our operations. This is demonstrated through the increase of bookings we've received since launching our new website.
Moving an existing site across
Done at a quiet hour, with the old host still running until we are sure.
What it is built on, what version it is on, what it connects to, and whether anything is going to object to being moved. Occasionally the honest answer is that the site should be rebuilt rather than relocated, and we will say so.
The site is stood up on our servers where you can click around it properly. Nothing points at it publicly and your live site carries on as normal.
Done at a quiet time with the records prepared in advance, so the gap is minutes rather than the day people expect. Email is checked as part of this, because that is what usually breaks in a move nobody planned.
We leave it running until the new one has proven itself. Cancelling on the same day is how people end up with no way back.
Common questions
What people ask before moving their site to us.
Do I have to host with you to have a site built?
No. We will build a site and hand it over to whatever host you prefer. Most clients ask us to host it because it means one team to call rather than two who can point at each other, but it is not a condition of the build.
Where are the servers?
On DigitalOcean, in their London region, so data stays inside the UK and the round trip to Northern Ireland is short. We provision and configure the machines ourselves rather than reselling space on somebody else's.
What does zero downtime deployment actually mean?
A new version of the site is built in its own directory alongside the running one, and only once it is ready does the server switch across to it. Visitors never land on a half-updated site, and if something is wrong the previous version is still there to switch back to.
How do backups work?
Backups are taken on a schedule and kept away from the server they came from, because a backup sitting on the machine that failed is not a backup. Databases and uploaded files are both covered.
Can you move an existing site to your hosting?
Yes, and we do it often. We take a copy, stand it up on a staging server, check it works, then move the domain across at a quiet time. The old host stays running until we are sure the new one is right.
What happens if the site goes down?
We are alerted rather than waiting to be told. Because we built the site, whoever picks it up already knows the codebase and does not need an hour of context before starting.
Is hosting the same as maintenance?
No. Maintenance is the ongoing care of the site itself, its updates, its content and its small changes. Hosting is the server underneath it and keeping that server healthy. Most clients take both, and they are priced separately so you can see what each one costs.
What sits around it
Hosting is rarely the only thing somebody needs.
Maintenance
Updates, backups and the quiet work that keeps a site healthy once it is live.
Read moreBespoke websites
Sites built for the business rather than adapted from a template.
Read moreLaravel development
The framework we build on, and the one we are most often asked to take over.
Read more