Web Hosting Scotland

Solid hosting starts with the fundamentals.

For every extra second it takes your website to load, another 10% of people will give up and leave. That’s a massive number. Therefore, getting page load times as fast as possible is a priority for every business.

When someone visits your website, data needs to physically travel back and forth between the visitor’s device and the server. The issue is that most data centres are located in the USA, which means your data needs to take a 5,000 to 10,000 mile trip around the world – significantly impacting load times for your visitors in the UK.

All other things being equal, you get the best performance when your website server is physically located in the same country. If you’re a UK business selling within the UK, that means having a UK server. Simple, but often overlooked.

Straight off the bat, many customers notice an immediate improvement in speed simply from migrating their website to us, before any other optimisation actions are taken.

Professional email means email addresses ending at your business domain name, for example, @theworkswebdesign.com, rather than @gmail or @hotmail, instantly communicating credibility and professionalism.

It has been proven that customers feel more confident approaching a business online that has a proper email address. It increases trust, and makes a business look more credible. Professional email also allows owners to clearly separate personal and work life, assign email addresses to key employees or functions, set up autoresponders, filtering rules, signatures, and more.

Many hosts charge a fee per email address, which even with a small team and an enquiries line, can quickly add up. Not only do we include email with our managed hosting, we can help you set it up and configure it on any device or program. We also set up and monitor site functions that depend on email (e.g. forms, notifications) to ensure they are working as they should.

Backing up your website data on a regular basis is essential, because you never know what will happen – even with the best security measures in place.

Don’t all hosts include backups?

All hosts take some kind of automatic backup, but in many cases these are stored on the same server (or even the very same folder) as the website. These backups are not reliable. Imagine making photocopies of a really important document, and storing the photocopies in the same briefcase as the original. If you lose the briefcase, you lose the backups. What would be the point of that? Many hosts do the digital equivalent of this.

If the server is wiped, your data is lost with it. If you get hacked, you can’t trust the backups to be clean of the same malware infecting the main site. There is nothing you can do, except pay a specialist company a large fee to remove it, which is not even guaranteed. Or else you need to rebuild your entire site from scratch. Backup systems like this only provide a false sense of security. This is why we store full backups of your website remotely, off-site, where they can’t be compromised.

Standard hosts maintain the server environment the website software runs on, but they don’t maintain the website itself. Website software receives updates almost every day, and if you don’t keep on top of it, two things are guaranteed: parts of your website eventually stop working (e.g. contact forms), and your website becomes increasingly vulnerable to attack.

Aren’t updates automatic?

WordPress themes and plugins can be set to update automatically, but new plugin versions can conflict with other plugins, and break site functions in an unpredictable way. Support forums and Facebook groups are full of stories every day from people whose entire site has stopped working following an automatic update. 

As part of our website management schedule we perform safe updates, the best solution – manual updates with the ability to instantly roll back any changes that .

We provide all websites with an SSL certificate. This encrypts the connection between the server and visitor, and protects any data that visitors may send for example through a contact form. Sites without an SSL certificate warn users not to visit the site or fill out their information, and also receive a ranking penalty from Google. Many hosts charge people extra for SSL certificates then don’t even set them up. We take care of all this as part of your hosting plan.

We also run a firewall and antivirus (Immunify 360) at the server level, which scans and protects against attacks and malicious users. We also address common weak points – such as easy to break passwords, too many admin accounts and out of date (and therefore vulnerable) themes and plugins – as part of our onboarding and ongoing maintenance process. We can also help you audit the data your website is collecting and storing, so that your exposure is minimised in the event of a breach.

No security is bulletproof, but it’s about being aware of the issues and making it more trouble than it’s worth to breach your site. And ensuring that, if the worst happens, we can react quickly and be back online with minimal loss and downtime.

This is where our managed hosting really comes into its own. We are not passive hosts but active partners, here to help you get the most from your website. As part of our managed hosting, we can go in and make updates, changes and improvements as needed. It’s hard to list everything we can cover, so we have included a couple of case studies on this page so you can get a better flavour of what we can do.