There there are many cheap hosting options for clients to choose from so you may be wondering why HdK’s hosting costs more. Let me walk you through some of reasons for letting your web developer, HdK, host your website versus using a cheaper third-party hosting company.
Leave it to us
As we know your website best, it makes sense that we match the website with hosting we know inside out. It’s in our interest to ensure that the website runs smoothly and without problems. Managing client websites for nearly twenty years, we’ve refined our hosting offering through experience to optimise the websites we build. Between our web team and hosting engineers, we constantly run monitoring tools to pick up on hiccups which can often be resolved before you even notice.
Better troubleshooting
During the life of your website, HdK will undoubtedly have to troubleshoot the odd issue. Your website could be running slowly, it’s reached its bandwidth limit, the search is not sharing the results you expect or you’re getting error messages. We’ve witnessed this happening when it’s least convenient – when an important client or funder needs to see your portfolio or when a new event goes on sale. There is a myriad of reasons at stake but it could be connected to your hosting. Because we host hundreds of websites on the same platform which we access on a daily basis, we have formed processes and routines to quickly reach the root of the problem. When we have to go through one of the countless alternative hosting companies, each with their own interface, this typically results in delays. With third-party hosting, it can sometimes be less clear where responsibility lies. When you host your website with HdK, you only have one point of contact for all website related matters.
A quality service
We set out to provide a quality and professional hosting service to our clients with an uptime of 99.99%. After all, we want to spend more time developing websites than managing hosting issues. With nearly 20 years of managing hosting for our client websites, we’ve made sure our clients get an excellent hosting service. For example, we take responsibility for making sure your hosting software is upgraded when required. This can be a precarious process if not managed carefully alongside upgrades to your website’s software and plugins.
While there are great web hosting companies out there, in our experience, clients don’t always have the technical knowledge to know what they’re buying and can often only go on price alone. They tend to go for the big companies which offer the cheapest deal where support is routed through a large call centre. That’s fine for some issues, but can be frustrating for more complex problems. As you want more from your website, it’s good to have someone you already know and trust dealing with any hosting related issues.
Good for the environment
Best of all, and what we’re most proud about at HdK, is that the hosting we provide covers three non-negotiable values in our eyes. We know our hosting offers excellent security, is based in the UK – good for GDPR – and is powered by renewable energy. The last point alone helps our clients reduce the carbon footprint of their websites – something many clients haven’t ever considered. Follow the links at the end of this post for more information on carbon friendly hosting.
What is covered in your annual hosting fee
- Quality hosting service powered by renewable energy
- Professional grade security
- 24 hour troubleshooting (depending on availability of team)
- Daily offsite back ups for additional resilience
- A flexible service – we’ll often give temporary upgrades for free in emergencies – such as times you’re expecting a rush of traffic such as an on sale date or a live-streamed event
- If your site is still hacked – it can happen to even the very best sites – we’ll cover your first year with securi.net to fix the hack and actively protect it against similar style hacks (not available on discounted packages)
- Server upgrades in conjunction with WordPress, plugins or new feature upgrades as required
- Unlimited troubleshooting
- Free Geo-Trust SSL certificate
- Application Firewall
- 99.9% uptime SLA
- Free temporary scaling
For available package prices and for more on the technical side of things, please ask for more information.