Web Hosting Scotland
Web Hosting Redefined
VIP Website Hosting. Based in Glasgow.
VIP Hosting. Based in Glasgow
Are you looking for the best web hosting for your business? You’re in the right place.
Our hosting is for you if:
You need a responsive and reliable host to look after your website
Your website experiences problems like downtime (going offline), slow speed, security issues and “hacks”, error messages, delivery issues, missing pages, broken layouts and other glitches that need fixed
Your current host is slow to respond, or never gets around to fixing issues
You want to make updates or improvements to your website, but don’t need a full website redesign
Rock solid hosting
The core of our service is a high quality, beefed up web hosting plan designed specifically for small businesses. Here are some of the primary features at a glance:
- Super fast UK data centres
- Unlimited business email
- Unlimited storage and bandwidth
- SSL Security Certificate
- Firewall and Antivirus
- Daily offsite backups
- Website core and plugin updates
- 24/7 monitoring
Above and beyond
Beyond providing fast, reliable hosting, we can actively manage and maintain your website. With a few reasonable exceptions, we can take care of anything you need.
- When you host with us, it's like having your own website department. Need something fixed, changed or added? We're on it. Need advice? Just call or email. We're here to ensure you get the most from your website, while you concentrate on business.
We’re more than just a host; consider us a part of your team. We’ll make sure everything is running smoothly, and we’re there to help whenever you need it.
Get in touch today and we’ll even migrate your website for free.
Why choose us
Errors, broken pages, slow loading, email issues, out of date information and other signs of a neglected website can reflect poorly on your business. Any one of these problems can cost you sales without you even knowing it. And it’s not only fixing problems. You may also need to make updates to website content, or add new features as you grow, and struggle to do it yourself.
Most web hosts don’t care about these things, but we do hosting differently.
If you have a website that represents your business online, having a proactive and responsive host is essential. That’s where we come in. We understand the problems small businesses face, and have designed our hosting service around you.
Here are some of the key elements of our service in more detail, so you can understand what we do and why, and how it benefits your business.
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.
Case Studies
The best way to explain the extra help we can provide is by demonstration. We’ve popped up a couple of case studies on this page to show you.
We do Bars
We were contacted by the owner of We Do Bars, who had a number of concerns that their website was not functioning properly. Specifically, the website was giving visitors a security warning. They also weren’t sure if they were receiving and sending emails properly.
We migrated the site and installed a security certificate to fix the warning (the owner had paid for a security certificate, but the host never installed it). Next we did a site health check and found that the contact form was not working at all.
We fixed the contact form and set up reliable email to ensure delivery. Within 48 hours, the first enquiry came in. Email delivery is now monitored so the owner can be certain every enquiry comes through.
We also fixed lots of alignment and layout issues throughout the site, such missing images from a gallery of past clients, social buttons that didn’t link up and layouts that broke at different screen sizes.
We Do Bars now has a fully functioning site that is being maintained and monitored, and bringing in regular enquiries on autopilot.
Beecraigs Festive Forest
We were contacted by the Rowen Events team for assistance with the website for their signature event, Beecraigs Festive Forest. The website experiences a huge jump in traffic levels from October through to December. They needed a reliable host to ensure the site would cope with the traffic, as well as make updates throughout the website and be on hand for support before and during the event.
Setup: We migrated the site to our server, ensuring there would be more than enough capacity to handle the traffic, and set up litespeed server cache to maximise speed. We installed a heavy duty security plugin on top of our usual firewall. We also audited and removed a large number of redundant plugins that were impacting performance.
Optimise: As we continued the audit we discovered that the newsletter signup was not properly connected, meaning contacts never reached the mailing list. We were able to retrieve these and access a list of 5,000+ extra people for this year’s marketing push. We tested all forms, cleaned up the database and implemented a retention policy to keep on top of records.
Support: As the busy period approached, we made countless content updates, tweaks and changes to the website, from the FAQ, gallery sections and sponsors, to embedding video and rearranging/rewriting pages. With a seasonal event there is no time to lose, so we responded very quickly (as always) to all requests. Finally, we kept statistics throughout the year and produced an end of event report, so that, for the first time, the team can analyse their traffic in detail and use the information to plan next year.
Full Hosting Features
Core features
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UK-based datacentres
Local servers ensure maximum speed for visitors in Scotland and U.K. -
LiteSpeed architecture
Premium server tech delivering faster performance than Apache, the standard server used by most hosts -
24/7 Uptime Monitoring
Our system pings your website every few minutes and alerts us immediately to any significant problem -
Unlimited Bandwidth
Unlimited website visitors and traffic -
Unlimited SSD Storage
Unlimited fast access storage space for website content
Performance
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Caching
Pre-loads your web pages for even faster page speed -
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Distributes website content to a network of servers to increase speed irrespective of location
Security
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Firewall
Monitors and blocks suspicious activity -
Antivirus (Imunify 360)
Scans and removes suspicious files -
SSL Certificate
Padlock icon to trust with customers and banish unsightly security warnings -
Backups
Off-site: Twice daily backups for instant reversal of recent changes
Fully remote: Monthly disaster recovery backups to offsite cloud storage
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Site Maintenance
WordPress, theme and plugin files kept up to date with latest compatible versions -
Email Deliverability
We set up SMTP to ensure critical site emails actually send, and don't bounce or land in junk -
Email
Industry standard domain email -
Site email monitoring
We monitor email delivery (not content) to ensure critical emails from your website (e.g. contact forms) get sent without fail -
Analytics
How many visitors do you get, what pages are most popular, and how many visits turn into enquiries? Vital stats tracked so you can improve your business.
And more
Contact us
If you are interested in our managed hosting or have any questions, get in touch and we’ll be happy to have a chat and see if we can help.
Case study #1
A business getting Zero enquiries
We were contacted by a busy catering company whose website was giving visitors a security warning. Their inbox had also been very quiet lately, enquiries wise…
We migrated the site and installed a valid security certificate, immediately fixing the warning. As we proceeded to audit the site we uncovered that the contact form had stopped working some time ago due to an update – enquiry forms were not being sent to the owner!
Primary Goal: We fixed the contact form and set up reliable email to ensure delivery. Within 48 hours, enquiries resumed. Email delivery is now being monitored so that the owner can be certain they’re getting all messages from now on.
Secondary issues: We fixed alignment and layout issues throughout the site, missing images from a gallery of past clients, broken social buttons, and other small issues.
Development: In the months since, we added a signup form to connect to their email marketing software. We also added a couple of new pages for services, and a live feed of their instagram account to the homepage.
Case study #2
A High Traffic Seasonal Event
We were contacted by an events company for assistance with their website. Their website experiences a huge jump in traffic levels from October through to December. Last year the site had gone offline several times, with each day’s downtime costing lost revenue…
Setup: We migrated the site to our server, ensuring there would be more than enough capacity to handle the traffic, and set up caching to boost speed. With a question mark over security after the previous year, we installed a heavy duty security plugin on top of our usual firewall. We also manually audited and removed a large list of redundant plugins that were creating vulnerabilities while serving no function.
Beyond: As we continued the audit we discovered in the database that the newsletter field had never been connected properly to email, therefore the contacts never reached the mailing list. We were able to retrieve these and immediately download a list of 5,000+ extra people for the company to use in their marketing. At the same time we cleaned up millions of database rows clogging up the site, and implemented a retention policy to keep on top of records.
Support: As the busy period approached, we made countless content updates, tweaks and changes to the website, from the FAQ, gallery sections and sponsors, to embedding video and rearranging/rewriting pages. With a seasonal event there is no time to lose, so we responded very quickly (as always) to all requests. Finally we kept statistics throughout so that, for the first time, the client will be able to see not just their overall traffic, but the sources of that traffic (i.e. Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) to use this information to plan next year.