Fully managed web hosting means the running of the server is somebody else’s job, and the website is yours. That is the short version. If you read no further, you have the answer.
Renting you space on a machine is the easy part, and at that level it is much the same product wherever you buy it. What separates one host from the next is the work the machine and the website on it need every week afterwards, and who is expected to do that work.
So the useful question to ask a host is not “is this managed?”. It is “when these jobs need doing, who does them?”
The jobs a live website generates
A website that is switched on produces a steady trickle of small maintenance tasks. Not one of them is difficult on its own. It is relentless, and it takes no notice of how busy you are. Skip enough of it and the site falls over eventually, usually during the week you are quoting for something that matters.
Most of the list looks like this.
- Operating system and PHP security patches, applied when they are released rather than eventually
- WordPress core, theme and plugin updates, applied and then checked afterwards
- An SSL certificate that renews before the old one runs out
- Backups taken daily, kept somewhere other than the server, and occasionally restored to prove they work
- Somebody noticing at 3am that the site has stopped answering
- DNS records edited when you change email provider or plug a new tool into your domain
- Disk space, memory use and a database that slowly fills with rubbish nobody deletes
Unmanaged, budget shared and fully managed
Unmanaged hosting hands you a server and the root password. Every job on that list belongs to you from that moment on. Plenty of developers want exactly that, and we have no argument with them.
Budget shared hosting sits in an odd middle, and it is the tier most small businesses are actually on without realising it. The host does patch the machine, because hundreds of other websites live on it too. The layer you care about is left alone: your WordPress install, your plugins, your backups, your certificate.
Here is what that division looks like on a real day. Your host announces that the machine is moving to a newer version of PHP. That is their half of the job, and a sensible thing for them to do, because the old version stopped receiving security fixes. They send the notice, they do the upgrade, the server is supported again. Your half contains a booking plugin last touched in 2019 which does not run on the new version. Nobody tested that, because testing it was never theirs to do, so you find out from a white screen. We have written about that email and what to do with it separately, because so many people get one.
Nobody there has ever looked at your website specifically, so when it misbehaves you end up describing the symptoms to a stranger who has not looked at it either.
Fully managed means somebody has looked. We know what your site runs on, what it needs, and what went wrong with it last time.
What fully managed hosting includes here
Our own inventory is published on the web hosting page, and read cold it looks like everybody else’s inventory, because at that level of description it is: UK servers, certificates, daily copies held away from the machine, updates, monitoring, DNS, mail, a free move from wherever you are now.
An inventory cannot show you the thing that actually distinguishes one from another, which is whether each line has a name against it. Ours do. There is no upgrade tab, no plan where the backups are the premium version, and nothing on the list that sits still until you notice it has stopped. That last one is where most hosting accounts fail: the software was perfectly capable of doing the job, and no human being ever checked whether it did.
Support is the part customers notice most. You get a phone number, an email address, and WhatsApp if that suits you better. We are small enough that a message has nowhere else to go but the people who run the servers, so out of hours it lands with Olly, who owns the place and has never yet managed to leave a broken website alone until morning.
If your site runs on WordPress, our WordPress hosting is this same service with the core, theme and plugin work folded into it. A month of that work, job by job, is written up in what managed WordPress hosting actually involves.
Who it suits
Paying a host to manage all this earns its money when the website has a job to do. If enquiries or orders arrive through it, an afternoon offline has a figure attached, and that figure is usually larger than a month of hosting. It earns its money a second time when nobody at your company wants to be the person who understands servers, and hardest of all when somebody already is that person by accident. A fair few of our customers are the office manager or the founder who once set the email up and have been the IT department ever since. Handing that over is mostly relief.
The other group it suits is anybody running something awkward: an old PHP site, a shop carrying a pile of extensions, a bespoke system whose author left years ago. Those are the accounts a budget host would rather not have, and they are the ones we find most interesting.
It suits fewer people than we would like to pretend, mind. A developer who enjoys running her own box should carry on running it. A personal blog that nothing depends on does not need us. If your website is a static business card getting a handful of visits a month, a basic shared account is enough, and probably always has been.
What fully managed web hosting costs
We charge £1 a day + VAT to start, or £30 a month + VAT if you would rather think of it that way. That buys a single site, its mailboxes, and every job described above.
Several sites, a WooCommerce or OpenCart shop, a reseller account for an agency, or a dedicated server of your own are all priced once we know what the machine has to carry. Putting a number on that beforehand would be a guess dressed up as a quote.
Set against two or three pounds a month, £30 is a lot more money. Set against one afternoon of somebody’s time putting a hacked site back together while you are trying to run a business, it stops looking expensive fairly quickly.
Fully managed hosting FAQs
Do I still need a web developer if my hosting is fully managed?
For changes to the website itself, yes. We look after the server, the software updates, the backups and the security, so the site keeps working. Writing new pages, redesigning a layout or building a booking system is design work rather than hosting work. Design work goes to dijitul, our sister agency, when a customer wants it doing.
Who is responsible if my website goes down on fully managed hosting?
We are, for everything on our side of it: the machine, the network, the mail service and the software we maintain. If the cause turns out to be something added to the site last week, we still find it and tell you what it is, then fix it or quote for fixing it. One number to ring either way.
Can I still log in and manage my own files?
Yes. Every managed account can have Plesk access, so files, databases and email settings are there whenever you want them. Most of our customers never open it, which is rather the point of paying someone else to run the server. The access is offered rather than taken away.
Is fully managed hosting worth it for a small business?
It depends what the website does for you. If it brings in enquiries, orders or bookings, an afternoon offline costs more than the hosting does in a month. If it is a personal project you could rebuild in an evening, a cheap account is the right buy and you can stop reading here.
Try the question on whoever hosts you now
The question at the top of this page works on any host, us included. Ring 01623 650 333, tell us what your website is and what it does, and you will get our answer to it item by item: who patches the machine, who updates the software, who looks at the site afterwards, who picks the phone up at the weekend. Then put the same question to your current host and compare the two replies.
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