“My web host won’t help me”: what your host should actually do

People say “my web host won’t help me” and mean one of two very different things. Either the host is refusing to do something that is genuinely theirs to do, which is a problem. Or they are refusing to do something that was never included in what you are paying, which is disappointing but fair. Telling those apart is most of the argument.

The short answer: every host, at any price, owes you a working server, a clear account of what is happening on it, your own data on request, and a reply from a human being within a sensible time. What varies with the money is how far into your website they will come.

The line every host draws

Somewhere in every hosting company there is a line between “the server” and “your website”. On one side: the machine, the disk, the network, the mail service, the version of PHP, the firewall. On the other: your theme, your plugins, your code, your content, your shopping cart.

Unmanaged and budget hosting draws that line hard, and it is not unreasonable of them. You are paying a few pounds a month for a slice of a machine. Nobody can afford to debug your checkout for that. The trouble is that the line is rarely explained at sign-up, so the first time you meet it is the day something is broken and you are told it is not their side.

Managed hosting moves the line. That is the entire product. We are on the hook for the updates, the backups, the security and the “why has this gone wrong” question, which is why it costs more than a few pounds and why we can pick the phone up about your site specifically.

What you should get at any price

Some things are not premium extras. They are the floor, and a host that will not do them is one to leave regardless of what you are paying.

• A straight answer about whether the server is at fault. Not a diagnosis of your code. Just a yes or no about their side, and if they will not say, that itself is the answer.
• Your data, when you ask. Files and database, in a usable form, without the request being slowed down because you mentioned you were leaving.
• Notice of things they do to you. Planned maintenance, PHP versions being retired, a migration to new hardware. Finding out from your own error page is not acceptable at any price.
• Say something during an outage. “We know, we are on it, here is the page to watch” beats silence by a distance.
• The ability to leave. Your domain lock lifted, your transfer code or tag when requested, your access kept until you go.
• A reply from a person. Slow is survivable. A loop of bot answers and canned articles that never ends is not.

What is fair to expect from cheap hosting

If you pay a few pounds a month, expect the server to be there, the disk to hold your files, and a ticket queue that gets to you eventually. That is the deal, and for a personal site or a leaflet with a phone number on it, that deal is fine.

What is not fair to expect at that price is somebody reading your error logs at ten at night, restoring last week’s version of one page, working out which plugin update broke your booking form, or explaining why your emails are going to spam. Those jobs are what managed WordPress hosting exists to cover. Those are hours of a skilled person’s time. They cost more than your monthly bill, and asking for them and being turned down is not the host misbehaving.

The mistake is not choosing cheap hosting. The mistake is leaving a website on it long after that website became how customers find you, and then being surprised that nobody was minding it.

The grey area, and how a good host handles it

Most real problems begin as a mystery. The site is slow. Email is landing in junk. The cart empties itself. Nobody knows yet whether that is the server or the site, and the customer certainly does not.

A poor host uses the grey area as a shield: it is not us, close the ticket, next. A good one spends fifteen minutes narrowing it down even when the answer turns out to be your side, and tells you what they found. We do that because it is quicker than three days of email tennis, and because a customer who knows what actually happened does not ring back about the same thing next month.

If your host has never once told you something useful about your own website, that is worth noticing. It usually means your site has never been opened by anybody at that company.

Things that genuinely are not your host’s job

In fairness to the industry, some of what gets asked of hosts belongs to somebody else entirely. Writing your content. Designing pages. Building features. Getting you to the top of Google. Fixing a bug in a plugin somebody else wrote, or in code your last developer left behind. Recovering data from a backup you never had.

A host can often help with those, and we frequently do because dijitul has been building sites since 2006 and the people are in the same room. But it is a separate piece of work with its own price, and a host that tells you so at the point you ask is doing you a favour rather than fobbing you off.

Getting a stuck ticket moving

Before you decide to leave, it is worth one properly written message. Most tickets stall because the first-line agent cannot tell what is being asked.

1. Say what happens, on which page, at what time, and what you see. Paste the exact error text rather than describing it.
2. List what you have already ruled out, so nobody sends you the article about clearing your cache.
3. Ask one specific question they are able to answer. “Please check the server error log for this domain between 2pm and 3pm today” gets somewhere. “My site is broken, help” does not.
4. If the reply does not address it, ask politely for it to be escalated to someone with server access, and say so in those words.
5. Keep everything in writing. If it comes to a dispute or a refund, the thread is what you have.

When it is time to go

Some of it is patience-testing. The same fault keeps coming back and nobody will say what causes it. Nobody answers out of hours and your business does not stop at five. You are spending more time chasing your host than running the company, which is a cost even when nothing is broken.

The rest is the fire alarm. You ask for a backup and discover there isn’t one, or the one there is cannot be restored. Access to your own files or database is refused, delayed, or made conditional on something. Your domain is held in somebody else’s name and they will not correct it. Any one of those is a reason to start moving that week rather than to write another polite email.

Leaving is easier than it feels from the inside. The domain is yours, the site is yours, and a decent host will do the moving. We have written out step by step what that actually involves. What you are really deciding is whether you want to carry on managing the arrangement yourself, and our best web hosting page sets out what the other way looks like.

Web host support FAQs

What support means here

There is no ticket system here and nothing that replies to you with a chatbot. There is a phone number, there is an email address, and there is WhatsApp for people who prefer it, and whoever answers is one of the people who look after the servers. Monitoring is genuinely around the clock, not a daytime rota with alerts stacking up until Monday, and out of hours Olly picks it up himself. That is not a call centre in another time zone. It is a small team who will already know your site.

It starts at £1 a day + VAT on UK servers, and that price carries the updates, the daily off-site backups, the security monitoring and the move itself. We would rather charge that and fix things before you notice than charge two pounds a month and argue with you about whose fault it is.