Hosting is the rented computer your website lives on. It is usually chosen once, by whoever built the site, and never thought about again.
That is fine while it works. When it does not, the symptoms show up as marketing problems: enquiries dip, pages feel slow, emails go missing.
What hosting affects
Speed
Every page view begins with the server answering a request. If the server is underpowered, or shared with too many other sites, that first response is slow, and no amount of image compression afterwards will recover the time. Slow first responses feed directly into LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), which is Google’s measure of how quickly the main content appears and one of the three Core Web Vitals.
Good hosts also provide caching, which means storing ready-made copies of pages so the server does not rebuild them on every visit, and often a content delivery network, which serves files from a location nearer the visitor.
Uptime
Uptime is the proportion of time your site is reachable. Outages often happen at night or in short bursts, so you may never see one yourself. A visitor who meets an error page rarely tries again.
Security
The host controls the server’s software, the firewall, how sites on a shared server are separated from each other, and whether your SSL certificate (the thing that gives you HTTPS and the padlock) renews without anyone having to remember. On poorly run shared hosting, one compromised site can cause trouble for its neighbours.
Email deliverability
This applies if your company email, or your website’s form notifications, are sent through the same provider. Cheap shared hosting often sends mail from addresses shared by many customers. If one of them sends spam, the reputation of that address suffers and your messages can be marked as junk along with theirs.
The quiet version of this problem: a visitor fills in your contact form, the site says “thank you”, and the notification never reaches your inbox.
If your enquiry form emails you through the web server, test it monthly. A silently failing form looks exactly like a quiet month.
Symptoms of poor hosting
- The admin area is sluggish. If saving a page in your CMS (the system you edit the site in) takes many seconds, visitors are probably waiting too.
- Speed varies by time of day. Fast in the morning, slow mid-afternoon suggests you are competing with other sites on the same server.
- PageSpeed Insights flags server response time. Look for a recommendation about reducing the initial server response.
- Occasional error pages. “Error establishing a database connection”, 502, 503 or 504 messages that clear on refresh.
- Certificate warnings. The site has shown a “not secure” warning because a certificate expired.
- Form emails arrive late, in junk, or not at all.
- Nobody can tell you when the last backup was taken.
- Support is a ticket queue with replies measured in days.
- Old software. The server runs versions of its underlying software, such as PHP, that are no longer supported.
Two free checks you can run today. First, put your homepage and one inner page through PageSpeed Insights and read what it says about server response. Second, sign up for a free uptime monitoring service, point it at your homepage, and leave it running for a month.
Questions to ask your host or agency
Send these as an email.
- What type of hosting are we on: shared, virtual private server, dedicated or cloud? Roughly how many other sites share our server?
- Where is the server located?
- How often are backups taken, where are they stored, how long are they kept, and when was a restore last tested?
- Who applies updates to the server software and to our CMS and plugins? How often?
- Is the site monitored for downtime? Who is alerted, and what happens then?
- Does our SSL certificate renew automatically?
- Is there a staging site, meaning a private copy where changes can be tested before going live?
- Does our website send email through the web server? If so, how is that authenticated?
- If the site goes down on a Saturday, who do I contact and how quickly will a person respond?
- Whose name are the hosting account and the domain registered in?
Take the last question seriously. If your agency holds the hosting and the domain in its own account, you depend on its goodwill for access to your own website. The domain in particular should be registered to your company, with a login you control.
What managed hosting should include
“Managed” is a marketing word with no fixed definition. Before paying extra for it, check what is covered.
| Should be included | What that means in practice |
|---|---|
| Backups | Automatic, daily at least, stored away from the server, restorable on request |
| Updates | Server software kept current. CMS and plugin updates applied and checked |
| Monitoring | Automatic downtime alerts that go to someone who acts on them |
| SSL | Certificate installed and renewed without your involvement |
| Staging | A private copy of the site for testing changes safely |
| Security | Firewall, malware scanning, and a clean-up process if something gets in |
| Performance | Caching configured for your particular site |
| Support from a person | Someone who knows your site, reachable by phone or email, with a stated response time |
If your current arrangement includes none of this, you are on unmanaged hosting and the jobs in that table belong to you by default. Our guide to website security basics covers what that involves.
How to move without losing rankings
People stay on poor hosting for years because they fear a move will damage their search rankings. Moving host on its own, with the same domain and the same URLs, gives search engines nothing new to deal with. Rankings are lost when things change or break along the way.
Before
- Take a full backup of files and database, and keep a copy yourself.
- Crawl the current site with a tool such as Screaming Frog and save the list of every URL, title and redirect.
- List everything attached to the domain: email, subdomains, any third-party services. Ask whoever manages the DNS (the records directing your domain’s web and email traffic) for a copy of every record.
- Ask for the DNS record’s TTL (how long the old address is remembered across the internet) to be lowered a day or two ahead, so the switch takes effect quickly.
During
- Build the site on the new host and test it thoroughly before pointing the domain at it. Check forms, logins and any booking steps.
- Change nothing else. Same URLs, same content, same design.
- Make sure the SSL certificate is working on the new server before switching.
- Copy across the redirects, and check the new site is not carrying a “noindex” setting or a blocking robots.txt left over from testing.
After
- Crawl the new site and compare it with your saved list. Every old URL should still work.
- Submit a test enquiry and confirm it arrives.
- Send and receive a test email on the company domain.
- Watch Google Search Console for a few weeks for any rise in errors.
- Keep the old hosting running for a couple of weeks before cancelling, in case you need to go back.
If this is your first move, have your developer or new host lead it and use the lists above to check their work.
If you suspect your hosting but want evidence first, our Website Audit measures speed and security from outside your site and a person checks the findings. Hosting is also something we provide, so if you would like to talk it through, get in touch.