Hosting

Somewhere quiet for your site to live.

Most small organisations are paying every month for a slow box in another country, a stack of licence renewals, and a site they can't change without ringing someone. It doesn't have to be any of those things.

Where it runs

Near the people reading it.

The usual arrangement

Shared hosting sold in Europe is very often a server in the United States. We have looked at the DNS on more than one Portuguese organisation's site and found it answering from Utah. Every visitor, every page, every image: a round trip across the Atlantic before anything appears.

What we do instead

Your site is copied to data centres worldwide and served from whichever is closest — Lisbon for a reader in Lisbon, Sydney for a reader in Sydney. Not a tuning trick. Just not sending everyone to one machine.

What it costs

Most of the monthly bill is things you don't need.

A typical WordPress site — shared host, a premium theme, a few paid plugins — carries a running cost that is mostly licences and rent on a slow machine. Figures below are what these things generally run; yours will differ.

Line itemTypical setupWith us
Hosting€12–20/mo at renewalIncluded
Premium theme licence & support€2–3/mo, renewed yearlyNone — the site is built, not assembled
Translation plugin€0–15/moNone — both languages are built in
Newsletter / calendar plugin tiers€0–7/moNone
Storage for large mediaExtra, or not possible at allIncluded to a generous limit
Domain~€2/mo~€2/mo — it's yours, we don't mark it up
Running totalOften €30–50/moSaid up front, and small

We don't do promotional pricing that doubles at renewal, and we don't build deceptive practices into anything we make. The number you're quoted is the number.

Your site, actually yours

You change it. Not us, not a ticket, not next week.

The reason most organisation sites go stale is not laziness. It's that changing anything means asking someone, and asking someone means waiting, and eventually nobody bothers. So we build every site with an editor made for the person who'll really use it.

Everything that changes

News, articles, photo galleries, talks, videos, calendars, people — whatever your site is made of, it's editable. Sign in on your own site, change it, and it's live. No rebuild, no deploy, no waiting.

Backed up before every save

A snapshot is taken each time you sign in and again before every save, with one-click restore. Nobody has to be frightened of the edit button — that's what makes it safe to hand over.

Written instructions

A plain manual for the people who'll use it, describing the buttons in the order you'd meet them. Written for someone who has never edited a website.

What we actually charge for. Work you could do yourself in the editor and would rather we did, and design changes beyond what we agreed. That's it. If we've built the editor properly, you should need us rarely — which is the point of building it properly.

The rest of it

Things that only show up later.

Nothing to break into

A WordPress site is a live program with a database, a theme, and a dozen plugins, each an update you must apply and a way in if you don't. Most of our pages are plain files. There is no admin login to guess at, no plugin to exploit, and no Tuesday-morning update that takes the site down.

Your old links keep working

The quiet disaster of a rebuild is that every link anyone ever shared, and every search result, stops working on launch day. We map every address the old site published to wherever that content now lives — on a recent rebuild that was 246 separate rules — so nothing anyone saved goes dead.

Large media handled properly

Most hosting refuses files over a certain size, which is why so many organisations have their recordings scattered across Drive links and download pages. We put audio and video in object storage and stream it, so an hour-long talk plays immediately and can be scrubbed through like any other player.

You keep the files

Ordinary files in an ordinary format, on a stack anyone competent can pick up. If you ever want to leave, you take the site with you and we'll help you move it. Hosting shouldn't be a hostage arrangement.

Moving in

We do the moving.

Bringing a site across doesn't cost you an afternoon of downtime or a lost week of search results. We build the new one alongside the old, show you a live preview, map every old address to its new home, and switch it over when you say so. If it isn't right, nothing has been switched yet.