Cloud Hosting and Migration

Setup, migration and ongoing management across major cloud platforms, sized to what you need rather than what you might.

What you get

Hosting that stays up, and a move onto it that does not take your site down while it happens.

Most organisations do not think about hosting until something breaks. The site is slow at month end, the renewal notice arrives from a company nobody recognises, or the person who set it all up has left and taken the login with them. Hosting is invisible right up until it is the only thing that matters.

Who this is for

• Businesses on hosting nobody understands or has the password for
• Sites that are slow, or that fall over when traffic arrives
• Organisations paying for far more capacity than they use, or far less
• Anyone whose domain, email and website are tangled across three providers
• Companies moving away from a developer or agency and needing everything transferred cleanly

What is included

• Hosting set up on a platform matched to what you actually run
• Migration of an existing site with the content, the database and the email intact
• Domain configuration, DNS records and SSL certificates
• Email routing, so mail keeps arriving during and after the move
• Backups, and a tested way of restoring from them
• Monitoring, so a problem is noticed before a customer reports it
• Accounts registered in your name, with the credentials handed to you

Moving without going offline

A migration is judged on one thing: whether anyone noticed. Done properly, the site keeps answering throughout, mail keeps arriving, and the change is invisible to everyone outside the project.

That means building the new environment alongside the old one, testing it fully before anything is pointed at it, and switching over only once it is proven. It means lowering DNS time-to-live in advance so the change propagates in minutes rather than days. It means keeping the old environment running until the new one has demonstrably taken over.

Email is where migrations most often go wrong, because it is the part people forget is attached to the domain. Moving hosting without planning for mail is how organisations lose a day of enquiries and never find out what was in them.

Backups are only real if you have restored one

An untested backup is a belief, not a safeguard. Plenty of organisations discover on the worst possible day that the backup has been failing silently for months, or that it captures the files but not the database.

So we set backups up, and then we restore one, and check what came back. It is a small amount of work that turns an assumption into a fact.

How we work

We look at what you have before proposing anything, because hosting advice given without that is guesswork. Sometimes the right answer is that your current setup is fine and needs a tidy rather than a move.

If a move is warranted, we agree the plan in writing, including what happens if something goes wrong and how we roll back. Then we do it at a time that suits your business rather than ours.

Afterwards, everything is in your name. The hosting account, the domain registration, the DNS. If you later want somebody else to look after it, you can hand over access without asking our permission.

Questions we are often asked

Will my site go down during the move? That is the thing the plan is built around. Done properly, visitors see no interruption at all.

What happens to our email? It is part of the migration, not an afterthought. Mail routing is configured and tested before anything is switched over.

We do not know who our current host is. Can you find out? Usually, yes. Domain and DNS records tell us most of it, and we can work back from there.

Do we have to move to a specific provider? No. We work with the major platforms and pick based on what you run and what it costs to run it, not on what suits us.

Who owns the hosting account? You do. It is registered in your name and you hold the credentials.

What if something breaks after the move? The previous environment is kept until the new one is proven, so there is somewhere to go back to rather than a scramble.