Service · Managed Hosting
Your site stays up, secure, and backed up — without you having to think about it
Most small businesses pay for hosting and assume everything is taken care of. It isn't. SSL certificates expire, PHP updates break contact forms, security patches go unapplied for weeks, and when the site goes down at 11pm on a Saturday, you're on hold with a support queue that doesn't know your codebase. ArdinGate managed hosting is different: one person handles everything, responds when something breaks, and already knows what you're running. Three plans from $30 to $75 per month, month-to-month with no long-term contract: cancel with 30 days' notice, no fees to leave.
What "managed" has to include to mean anything
Most business owners buying hosting for the first time assume "managed" means someone is watching the site and handling problems. In practice, what most hosting plans call "managed" is a server environment — not active human oversight. Here is what a managed hosting arrangement needs to cover before the word earns its meaning.
Monitoring that catches site outages before your customers do
A server being "online" and your site working correctly are two different things. External monitoring checks your site from servers outside your host every 60 seconds and confirms a real response: not just that the hardware is running, but that the software is processing requests and sending back a working page. A server can be running while a code error makes every page return a blank screen. Standard shared hosting does not catch that. The first sign most business owners get that something is wrong is a customer email. With active monitoring, an alert fires the moment the check fails, investigation starts immediately, and for most issues the site is back before the outage has affected any meaningful volume of visitors. Every managed hosting plan includes continuous monitoring. The difference between plans is how fast the response window is.
Nightly backups stored somewhere other than the same server
"We do backups" is meaningless without specifics. The two things that matter are where the backup is stored and how far back you can go. Every managed plan runs a nightly snapshot of your site files and database and copies it to a storage destination that is physically separate from the hosting server. If the server itself is compromised, has a hardware failure, or a botched update overwrites your files, the backup at the separate location is unaffected. Snapshots are kept on a rolling 30-day basis, so you can restore to any specific day within the last month. For most problems where you need to roll back (a plugin update that breaks something, content accidentally deleted, a database change that went wrong), that 30-day window covers it.
SSL certificate renewal handled before the certificate lapses
An expired SSL certificate shows every visitor a "Your connection is not private" warning before they see a single word of your site. Chrome, Safari, and Firefox all display this as a full-page block, not a small banner they can dismiss easily. Most visitors close the tab. Let's Encrypt certificates are free and should renew automatically, but automatic renewal depends on a background process running correctly, having the right permissions, and no configuration change having disrupted it since the last renewal. When any of those conditions break quietly, the certificate does not renew and no one gets notified until a visitor sends a screenshot. On a managed plan, certificates are monitored for upcoming expiration and renewed well in advance. You won't find out your SSL expired from a customer complaint.
DNS management without the "just log into your cPanel" runaround
DNS is where your domain name connects to your hosting server, and it's where hosting relationships quietly break under situations that shouldn't require a developer. Switching your business email to Google Workspace, adding a subdomain for a client portal, setting up mail authentication records so your emails stop landing in spam, verifying your domain in Google Search Console. All of these require DNS record changes. On most shared hosting platforms, DNS management means navigating a cPanel interface with no guidance and calling a support line that points you back to documentation. On a managed plan, DNS records are handled on request: A records, CNAME records, MX records for email routing, TXT records for verification services, any subdomains the site needs. Send an email, get it done.
Software updates applied on a schedule, not after a crisis
When a security vulnerability is publicly disclosed for server software or a web platform, exploit code is available quickly and unpatched servers become targets within days. Self-managed hosting on shared platforms often means waiting on the hosting provider's update schedule, which can lag weeks behind a security release. On a managed site using hand-coded programming, server-level updates are applied on a regular maintenance schedule on every plan, including Core: programming language version updates, web server software, operating system updates. Application-level security is a separate layer: monitoring any tools used in the site code and updating them when problems are disclosed, and for WordPress sites, handling core, plugin, and theme updates proactively rather than letting them accumulate until something breaks. That layer starts on the Care plan. Server-level maintenance is included in every plan, not an add-on.
Support from someone who already knows your site
The structural problem with a shared hosting provider's support queue is that every agent who picks up your ticket is seeing your site for the first time. They don't know your codebase, your configuration, or what changed last month. Tier-one support means clearing your cache and trying a different browser before escalating to someone who will read your server logs cold. On a managed hosting arrangement with ArdinGate, support goes to one person who either built the site or has reviewed it thoroughly. The context is already there: what the site runs on, what the contact form does, what the DNS looks like, and what was touched last. That context is the difference between a fast resolution and a 4-day back-and-forth that ends with you being told to contact your developer.
What business owners discover when they try to manage their own hosting
Managed hosting is not a hard sell conceptually. The problems it prevents are vivid and specific. What makes it interesting is that most small business owners who are skeptical of the monthly cost have already experienced at least one of the failure modes below. They just did not know it was a hosting management problem that was preventable.
The security certificate that expired while everyone was looking the other way
Security certificates are supposed to renew automatically, but the background process that does it can quietly stop working. The renewal needs write access to the right folder and needs the server setup to match what was in place when the certificate was originally issued. A server move, a configuration change, or a hosting provider maintenance window can break that process without any notification. The discovery moment: a customer texts you a screenshot of the "Your connection is not secure" page they got when they tried to visit your site. By that point, visitors have been seeing a security warning for however many days passed between the expiration and the customer message. Renewing the certificate takes minutes. Without active monitoring for expiration, no one watches until a customer catches it first.
The software update that stopped all the contact form submissions
Shared hosting platforms push programming language updates on their own schedule and without asking. If your site uses a function or tool that was deprecated in a newer version, the update breaks it silently. On most production server setups, there is no visible error shown to visitors: just a form that stops sending emails or a page section that stops loading. Business owners often attribute this to a slow period rather than a technical problem. The discovery moment comes when you realize that weeks of contact form submissions simply never arrived. On a managed plan, software updates are controlled and applied carefully, and monitoring catches functional failures before they turn into weeks of missed leads.
The plugin update that took three pages down with it
Plugin conflicts are the single most common source of small-business site outages. A plugin updates, conflicts with another plugin that hasn't been updated in several months, and one or more pages start returning an error or a blank screen. The hosting provider's dashboard shows the server as online because the server is running fine. The problem is in your site software. Without monitoring that checks for working page responses rather than just whether the server is running, the outage is invisible until a visitor reports it. The fix is usually a matter of turning off the conflicting plugin or going back to a previous version. But it requires someone actively watching for the failure. That is what managed hosting provides and self-managed hosting does not.
The domain that lapsed because renewal notices went to a defunct inbox
Domain and hosting renewal notices go to the billing email on file with the registrar. If that address is outdated, no longer monitored, or belongs to an account that was set up years ago and since handed off, the notices disappear. The domain lapses. For 30 days it sits in redemption status, where the original owner can reclaim it for a fee ranging from $80 to $250 depending on the registrar. After that window, it goes back to the open market. Domain squatters specifically watch for lapsed domains that had established traffic. Recovering a domain from a squatter after the redemption window closes can cost thousands of dollars and sometimes isn't available at any reasonable price. This isn't a rare edge case. It happens regularly to small businesses with healthy sites whose billing communications went to somewhere nobody was monitoring.
How your hosting arrangement affects your ability to get new customers
Hosting decisions do not stay on the server. They propagate directly into the metrics that determine whether a site generates leads. Here is how hosting quality connects to the things that matter for your business.
Slow server response is a Google ranking problem, not just a visitor experience problem
How fast your server responds to a request sets the floor for everything else. A browser cannot start showing your page content until the server sends back the first piece of the response. If that first response takes 800 milliseconds (less than a second), your page cannot show its main content any faster than that, no matter how much you optimize everything else. Shared hosting commonly delivers slow first-response times even during moderate traffic. A properly set up hosting environment with the right resources runs significantly faster. Google uses page loading speed as a ranking signal, and that signal is affected directly by how fast your server responds. You cannot make up for a slow server by optimizing your SEO alone.
Site downtime affects Google's understanding of your pages, not just visitor access
Google's automated crawler visits your site on its own schedule. If your site is down when Google's crawler visits, it gets an error and skips the page. Repeated crawl failures signal unreliability to Google's system. Pages that can't be crawled consistently lose freshness signals and, over time, can be dropped from search results entirely. A site that is down 0.5 percent of the time sounds stable, but on shared hosting that downtime tends to cluster into several-hour windows during maintenance events — exactly the kind of pattern that causes repeated crawl errors within a short timeframe. Uptime isn't just about whether your customers can reach you; it's about whether Google can reliably crawl and index your pages.
A security breach costs far more than a year of managed hosting
A hacked site — one containing spam, malware, or poisoned search results — gets flagged by Google's safety system within hours of detection. Google shows a warning in search results and a full-page block in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Organic traffic drops to near zero immediately. Cleaning up the hack, submitting for reconsideration, and waiting for the safety flag to be removed is a process that takes days to weeks depending on how bad it is. During that time the site is essentially useless for bringing in new business. The annual cost of a managed hosting plan is less than the revenue most small businesses lose during a week-long security breach. Software updates are the most straightforward way to prevent that from happening.
A broken contact form is invisible in your analytics, but not to your competitors
A form that stops submitting, a checkout that throws an error, a booking widget that fails to load: these look like ordinary visits in your analytics data. The session is recorded, the visitor appears to have engaged with the page, and the missing conversion looks like the person decided not to contact you. Without active monitoring that checks for functional responses rather than just server connectivity, a broken contact form can go undetected for days or weeks. Every visitor who hit the broken form and left went to find another option. Some of those people called a competitor. The problem is invisible in your data and very visible in your competitors' lead counts.
Why GoDaddy, Bluehost, and HostGator do not deliver what "managed" implies
The major shared hosting platforms have products with "managed" in the name. What that word means in their marketing is narrower than what it implies. Here is the specific gap between what these platforms sell and what an actual managed hosting relationship provides.
Support is a call center, not a person who knows your site
GoDaddy's support queue starts with tier-one agents running through a script: clear your cache, try a different browser, disable your plugins. Technical escalation happens only after tier one exhausts its checklist — which means every interaction starts with steps that do not apply to your problem. With ArdinGate managed hosting, you email one address. The person who responds either built the site or has reviewed it thoroughly and knows what it runs.
The dashboard is a sales channel, not a management tool
GoDaddy and Bluehost dashboards are designed to surface upsells: SiteLock security scans, "professional email" upgrades, SEO tools, backup add-ons, domain renewal prompts. All are additional cost, most are unnecessary. The hosting control panel is a marketing channel. There is no equivalent in the ArdinGate arrangement. What you pay for is specified in the plan and nothing else gets surfaced.
Shared resources mean your site suffers when a neighbor spikes
Shared hosting puts your site on a server with hundreds of other properties. When a neighboring site runs a promotion or gets hit with unusual traffic, the resources available to your site shrink. "Guaranteed resources" in shared hosting contracts are guaranteed at the aggregate server level, not per individual site. A traffic spike during your own promotion can hit a resource ceiling you didn't know existed until the site starts returning errors.
Domain renewals are priced as a revenue event, not a service
GoDaddy's domain renewal pricing structure is well documented as a consumer issue: promotional rates for year one, market rate on renewal, then steady increases toward prices that are two to four times what independent registrars charge. Bundling your domain with your hosting at a large provider is convenient right up until you want to leave. With ArdinGate, your domain is never held hostage: it's registered in your name at a registrar you control, with the first year included free with every new build. If you'd rather not manage renewals yourself, I can handle them as part of a hosting plan. No transfer friction, no markup.
Managed WordPress hosting manages the server, not your site
Platforms like WP Engine and Kinsta offer managed hosting specifically for WordPress: server setup optimized for WordPress, automated core updates, programming language management tuned for WordPress compatibility. They don't know your specific plugins, your specific theme changes, or the last thing your developer built. A conflict between a plugin update and a WordPress core update still requires someone who knows your site to diagnose and fix. The server is managed. Your site itself is not.
Cancellation involves navigating your own data out
Several major shared hosts make downloading your own site files more complicated than it should be: navigating file manager interfaces, requesting database exports through support tickets, dealing with download timeouts on large sites. ArdinGate delivers a complete export of all site files and the database before hosting ends. You receive your files rather than having to navigate a panel to find and package them yourself.
Hosting plans
Three flat-rate plans, billed monthly, no annual commitment. Every plan includes the same core infrastructure: uptime monitoring, nightly offsite backups, SSL management, DNS management, server-level security patches, and direct email support. Plans differ by response priority and content edit allocation.
Core
$30/mo
- Uptime monitoring & alerts
- Nightly offsite backups (30-day rolling)
- SSL certificate management
- DNS management
- Server-level security patches
- Email support (24–48h response)
- Full site export on request
Care
$50/mo
- Everything in Core
- 1 hour/mo of content edits
- Proactive software updates applied
- Priority response queue
- Quarterly performance review
Priority
$75/mo
- Everything in Care
- 3 hours/mo of content edits
- Same-day response for critical issues
- Monthly analytics report (how to read your data)
- Test environment access
All plans are month-to-month. Full plan comparison and feature breakdown →
Managed hosting questions
What is managed web hosting and how is it different from regular hosting?
Regular hosting rents you server space and nothing else. Everything that keeps a site running — security certificates that expire and need renewing, backup copies, software updates, version management, monitoring for outages, and troubleshooting when something breaks — is your responsibility to figure out and pay for separately. Managed hosting means one person actively handles all of that on your behalf: pushing software updates before vulnerabilities become problems, creating backup copies and storing them somewhere other than the main server, renewing your security certificate before it lapses, watching the site around the clock for outages, and fixing things fast when they go wrong. The practical difference shows up on a Sunday night when a server update quietly breaks your contact form. On a managed plan, that gets caught and fixed before your business opens Monday morning. On a self-managed shared hosting account, you find out when a customer emails you to say your site is not working. For a thorough breakdown, see the managed hosting explainer and the maintenance scope guide.
How much does managed hosting cost?
Three flat-rate plans billed monthly with no annual contract. Core is $30 per month and covers the basics: monitoring for outages, nightly backup copies stored offsite, security certificate management, domain name management, server-level security patches, and email support with a 24 to 48 hour response window. Care is $50 per month and adds one hour of content edits each month, proactive software updates applied on a schedule, a priority response queue, and a quarterly performance review. Priority is $75 per month and adds three hours of monthly content edits, same-day response for critical issues, monthly analytics reporting, and access to a test environment for trying changes before they go live to your customers. To put the numbers in context: one hour of developer time to troubleshoot a hosting problem on a self-managed account generally costs more than two months of the Core plan. Full plan details are on the pricing page, and the hosting cost guide walks through what drives pricing across different provider types.
Can I cancel managed hosting anytime?
Yes. Hosting has no long-term contract: cancel anytime with 30 days' written notice and no cancellation fee. Your site stays live through the end of your current paid period, so you have time to move it somewhere else if you want to. Before hosting ends, you get a complete export of your site files and any database associated with it. There's no charge for the export and no migration fee for taking your own files. Server data is retained for 30 days after the paid period ends in case you need to request an export or there's a dispute, then it's purged. You can reinstate hosting within that window without rebuilding anything from scratch. The only thing you lose when you leave is the ongoing monitoring and maintenance: the site itself is yours regardless of whether you stay.
Which hosting plan is right for my business?
Core ($30 per month) is the right fit for sites that are stable and don't change often: an informational site updated a few times a year, a portfolio, a landing page running a specific campaign. Care ($50 per month) works for most active small businesses. The monthly content edit hour means price changes, new team members, updated hours, and seasonal updates don't require a separate conversation or a new quote. Priority ($75 per month) is for businesses where the website is a primary revenue or operations tool: a site that books appointments, handles online transactions, or gets significant traffic where downtime has a meaningful cost. The monthly analytics report and test environment at Priority are worth it for owners who actively track how the site performs, not just what it says. If you're not sure, Care covers the majority of small-business scenarios without overpaying for features you'd rarely use.
Do you host sites built by other developers?
In most cases yes, with one prerequisite: a brief code review before the hosting relationship starts. The review checks that the codebase is maintainable, doesn't have obvious security problems baked into the application, and won't need emergency cleanup shortly after transfer. Clean hand-coded PHP passes without issue. Well-maintained WordPress installs are fine. Heavily plugin-dependent WordPress sites with a backlog of deferred updates, sites built on abandoned frameworks, or sites running outdated PHP versions may need some cleanup work before hosting makes sense. The review is not a billable engagement: it's a due-diligence step before taking on ongoing responsibility for a site ArdinGate didn't build. If the site needs remediation before hosting is viable, that gets quoted separately and there's no pressure to proceed. Sites in good shape usually move through the review quickly and can be migrated within a few days. Get in touch with details and I can assess.
What happens to my site if I stop paying for hosting?
Your site stays live through the end of your current paid period. Before it comes down, you receive a complete export of everything: all PHP files, CSS, images, and a database dump if there's one. You can move it to any other host without losing anything. After the paid period ends, the site comes down and server data is retained for 30 days before being deleted, in case you need the export or there's a billing dispute. You can reinstate hosting during that window without rebuilding the server environment from scratch. There are no reactivation fees. If you cancel and come back later, pricing picks up at the current plan rates. The export is provided regardless of the reason for cancellation: it's not contingent on being in good standing or on any other condition.
What does "nightly offsite backups" mean for my site?
Every night, a complete copy of your site files and database is created and sent to a storage location that is physically separate from the hosting server. Not a second folder on the same machine: a completely separate destination somewhere else. If the server is compromised, has a hardware failure, or a bad update overwrites your files, the backup copy at the separate location is unaffected. Copies are kept on a rolling 30-day basis, so you can restore to any specific day within the last month. In practice, this covers the vast majority of situations where you need to go back in time: a plugin that breaks something, content you accidentally deleted, a change that went wrong, or a migration that didn't work out.
What does uptime monitoring cover and what happens when the site goes down?
Monitoring checks your site from external servers every 60 seconds. The check confirms that the site is responding correctly: not just that the server hardware is running, but that your site software is processing requests and sending back a working page. A server can be online while code errors make every page show a blank screen or an error message; a simple connectivity check would miss that entirely. When a check fails, an alert fires immediately and investigation starts. For Core plan clients, support responds within the standard 24 to 48 hour window. Care clients get a same-business-day response, and Priority clients get same-day response for critical issues. You get notified when an outage is confirmed and again when the site is back up, along with a brief explanation of what caused it. Most outages are resolved before visitors notice anything.
How do security patches work on a managed plan?
Software updates cover two layers: the server and the site code running on it. At the server level, that means updating the programming language version, the web server software, and the operating system with security fixes applied on a regular schedule rather than only when a crisis forces action — this layer is included on every plan, including Core. At the site level, it means monitoring any tools or components used in your site code and updating them when security problems are disclosed publicly, plus WordPress core, plugin, and theme updates for WordPress-based sites. That layer starts on the Care plan. Priority adds test verification before anything touches your live site: updates are tried in a private copy first, then applied to your live site after confirming nothing broke. Server-level maintenance is included in every plan. Site-level patching is included starting at Care. For a broader look at what website security involves, see the website security basics guide.
What is a test environment and do I need one?
A test environment is a private copy of your site that runs on the exact same server setup as your live version. It's identical in every way: software version, database, and file structure. If a change works correctly on the test site, it'll work correctly when it goes live. This is included in the Priority plan and is most useful in specific situations: testing a major update before publishing it, making sure that a software update doesn't break existing functionality, or building new pages without them being visible to the public while they're still being worked on. For most small businesses on Core or Care plans, a test environment isn't necessary: changes are small enough that a quick review before publishing is fine. If you're actively building new features on a site that's already live and getting visitor traffic, Priority with test access is the right plan. You don't want to test big changes on a page your customers are actively using.
What does the monthly content edit hour cover?
The monthly content edit hour covers changes to existing content on your site: updating text on any page, swapping an image, changing your hours or prices, adding or removing a team member, updating a service description, editing an FAQ item, updating a phone number or address, changing a link or call-to-action button. Work that falls outside the monthly edit hour and gets quoted separately: adding a brand new page, changing the navigation structure of the site, building a new feature like a booking form or a photo gallery section, or anything that requires writing new code rather than updating existing content. Unused time doesn't roll over from one month to the next: the hour resets on your billing date. Most Care plan clients use somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes of the monthly hour. If you find yourself consistently needing more than that, Priority gives you three hours.
Do you handle my domain registration and email hosting?
The first year of domain registration is included free with every new build, registered in your name at a registrar you control: not ArdinGate's account, yours. After that first year, you decide how renewals get handled: keep managing the domain yourself, or ask me to handle renewals as part of your hosting plan. Either way, what's included in every hosting plan is domain name management: pointing your domain at the hosting server, setting up subdomains, managing the records that route your email to your inbox, and adding verification records for services like Google Search Console or the email authentication settings that prevent your outgoing emails from landing in spam folders. Email itself is separate from website hosting. Most small businesses use Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 for email, and both work alongside any website hosting arrangement without friction. Setting up the domain records for your mail provider is included in the standard hosting setup at no extra charge.
Stop finding out your site is down from a customer.
Get in touch and I will review your current setup and recommend the right plan.
Contact me