Key facts
- Unmanaged hosting gives you a server and leaves every maintenance job to you.
- Budget shared hosts patch the server but usually leave your CMS, plugins, backups and certificate to you.
- Fully managed hosting puts a person against each job, from PHP patches to backup checks.
- dijihost monitoring runs 24/7, and out-of-hours problems go to Olly, the director.
- Every dijihost account can have its own Plesk login, though most customers never need it.
- dijihost Complete Hosting is £1 a day + VAT; multiple sites, shops and dedicated servers are quoted.
The short answer
Fully managed web hosting means the running of the server is somebody else's job, and the website is yours. 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 need every week afterwards, and who is expected to do it. 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. None of them is difficult on its own. The trouble is that they never stop and take no notice of how busy you are. Skip enough of them and the site falls over, usually in the week you are quoting for something that matters.
- Operating system and PHP security patches, applied when they are released rather than eventually
- WordPress core, theme and plugin updates, applied and then checked
- An SSL certificate that renews before the old one runs out
- Backups taken daily, kept away from the server, and restored now and then 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 is yours from then 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 on without realising it. The host patches the machine, because plenty 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 how that plays out. Your host moves the server to a newer PHP version because the old one stopped getting security fixes. That is their half of the job, done properly. Your half contains a booking plugin last touched in 2019 that does not run on the new version. Nobody tested it, because testing it was never their job, so you find out from a white screen. We have written about that PHP email and what to do with it separately.
Fully managed hosting means somebody has actually looked at your website. We know what it runs on, what it needs, and what went wrong with it last time. There is more on the difference in managed vs unmanaged hosting.
What fully managed hosting includes at dijihost
Read cold, our list looks like everybody else's: UK servers, free SSL, daily backups kept away from the server for 14 days, updates, 24/7 monitoring, Cloudflare DNS, 10 email accounts with webmail, and a free move from wherever you are now. The full list is on the Complete Hosting page.
What a list cannot show 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 could do the job, and no person 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 to go but the people who run the servers, so out of hours it lands with Olly, our director, who has never yet managed to leave a broken website alone until morning. For WordPress sites, WordPress hosting is the same service with core, theme and plugin work folded in, and a month of that work is written up job by job.
Who it suits, and who it does not
Managed hosting 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, usually larger than a month of hosting. It earns it again when nobody at your company wants to be the person who understands servers, and most of all when somebody already is that person by accident: the office manager or founder who once set the email up and has been the IT department ever since.
It also suits 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 the ones we find most interesting. See legacy PHP hosting.
It suits fewer people than we would like to pretend. A developer who enjoys running her own server should carry on. A personal blog nothing depends on does not need us, and a static business card site getting a handful of visits a month is fine on a basic shared account.
What fully managed web hosting costs
dijihost Complete Hosting is £1 a day + VAT, which is £365 a year + VAT, or £35 a month + VAT. That buys one 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 are priced once we know what the machine has to carry.
Set against a few pounds a month, that is more money. Set against one afternoon of somebody putting a hacked site back together while you are trying to run a business, it stops looking expensive fairly quickly. Ring 01623 650333 and ask us the question at the top of this page: who patches the machine, who updates the software, who looks at the site afterwards, who picks up the phone at the weekend. Then ask your current host the same thing.
Frequently asked questions
Do I still need a web developer if my hosting is fully managed?
For changes to the website itself, yes. dijihost looks after the server, software updates, backups and security, so the site keeps working. Writing new pages, redesigning a layout or building a booking system is design work rather than hosting work. That goes to dijitul, our sister agency, if you want 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 dijihost account can have its own Plesk login, so files, databases and email settings are there whenever you want them. Most customers never open it, which is rather the point of paying someone else to run the server. The access is offered, not 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 a month of hosting. If it is a personal project you could rebuild in an evening, a cheap account is the right buy. dijihost managed hosting is £1 a day + VAT.
Related
Set it up and forget about it
Managed hosting, Plesk, Cloudflare DNS, daily backups and your domain for £1 a day + VAT. We move your site for you.