Your website will be on two machines,
one in Virginia and one in Texas.

Yes, and it’s the price of the website rather than a deposit on one. $1 against a build that’s normally $1,500, paid once, and the website is bought.

It isn’t a first installment and there’s no second one. Nothing else is charged for the site itself, at any point.

Today you pay $1 for the website plus your first month of hosting. After that hosting is $8.99 a month, billed on the same date each month until you cancel, and you can cancel in any month. The same build is openly sold at $1,500, which is what a US agency charges for a small business site of this size.

Neither.

A designer here draws your site around your trade and a copywriter here writes every word of it from the answers you gave us. There’s no template to choose, no blank page and no editor to get the hang of.

Afterwards there’s nothing of yours to maintain either. We run one platform, with no plugins, and patch it overnight for every site on it, so you never get a version number or a message on a Sunday night telling you your site is out of date. That’s also why the hosting costs what it does.

Changing what is on the site later is your choice rather than your job. A price, a photograph or a set of business hours takes a few clicks in your dashboard, and if you’d rather not touch it at all, send the change over on chat and our team makes it at no extra cost.

How the websites are built sets out the week a job takes here.

Because a website has to live on a machine that’s awake at three in the morning, and that costs money every month whoever built the site.

Hosting is the one thing on that bill, and you would be paying someone for it whichever way you had the site made, including the website our team designs, writes and builds for you.

What we have done is make ours carry the certificate, the backups, the CDN, a mailbox, your domain run for you and a person, rather than sell you six of those separately. Carrying them doesn’t make it a more expensive bill: it’s what you would have paid for the machine on its own.

The figure in the first month is the figure in the sixtieth.

There’s no introductory rate here that doubles on renewal, which is the ordinary arrangement in web hosting and the reason people dread the anniversary email. The twelve bars in the status rail at the top of this page are drawn identical for exactly that reason.

If it were ever to change we would write to you before it did, and you could stop that month with nothing further to pay.

Three separate things, and they get muddled constantly.

• The domain is the name people type, held on the register in your own details for a yearly fee to the registry. We set the DNS and handle the renewal, and the domain names page sets out how that works
• The website is the pages themselves, designed, written and built by our team, and it costs $1 once against a build that normally runs to $1,500
• Hosting is the machine that serves those pages to a visitor, the certificate that keeps the padlock shut and the backup taken while you sleep. That’s the one thing billed monthly

You need all three, from someone, whoever builds the site. If you want the arithmetic on the first of them, what a domain costs, and who should own it goes through it line by line.

Nine things, on one bill:

• Servers in two United States data centers, with a global CDN in front of them
• An SSL certificate, replaced before it can expire
• A full backup every night, kept for at least thirty days and put back on request
• A firewall and a daily malware scan
• The server software patched overnight
• Monitoring that checks the site every minute from several places
• Your domain, with the DNS set and the renewal handled
• A mailbox on that name
• A team that starts fixing things when the monitoring goes off

Bought the ordinary way that’s nine separate services from nine separate companies, each with a login of its own and a renewal date of its own, which is the comparison drawn further up the page.

The registry’s own annual fee for the name is the one line that sits outside, and it’s the same fee wherever the name is held. The mailbox side of it is set out on the business email page.

Yes. The origin is two United States data centers. Your files, your backups and the inquiries from your contact form stay here.

In front of that sits a global content delivery network with fifteen edge locations, so a page still arrives quickly for someone reading it in Sydney. Nothing about your data leaves the arrangement above.

What we commit to in writing on uptime, response times and restores is set out on the service level page.

It should feel instant on a phone on a poor connection, because that’s where most of your visitors are. That’s the test set out in mobile first, really: what your site looks like on a bus.

Photographs are converted and resized to the size shown, pages are served from an edge near the reader, and the server software is kept current.

Speed decides whether people stay. Someone leaves before a slow page has finished drawing, and speed is one of the things Google measures when it decides who to show first.

Why your website is slow, and what it costs you explains what usually causes it, and our local SEO work is where the difference shows up in rankings.

More than most people expect, though not in the way the word SEO suggests.

Google measures how quickly a page draws on a phone, and whether the site is up at all when its crawler comes by. A slow server and an afternoon of downtime both cost you positions you had already earned.

The CDN, the resized photographs, the monitoring and the United States origin above are all doing that work as well as making the site pleasant to use.

What hosting can’t do on its own is put you at the top. That’s your words, the pages our team writes for you, your reviews and the steady monthly work described on our local SEO page. How to get your business on the first page of Google sets out how long that takes.

Both.

Prices, photographs, business hours, the products in your store and the words on any page are yours to change from your dashboard, in a few clicks, with no technical knowledge and nothing to install.

If you’d rather not, send it over on chat or by email and our team makes the change for you at no extra cost. Most suppliers give you one of those two. You get whichever suits you that week.

No caps and no overage invoices.

Capacity is pooled across every site we host, so the day the local paper writes about you and four thousand people arrive within the hour, the load is absorbed and nobody sees a bandwidth-exceeded page. The January inquiry rush is the predictable version of the same thing, and the same headroom covers it.

If a site ever grew into something enormous we would write to you long before anything changed.

Monitoring usually tells us first, and our team starts without waiting for you to notice.

If a site is ever compromised we take it back to a clean backup, close the hole and write to you explaining what happened.

There’s no incident charge and no fee for a restore. That’s what hosting is for.

No to all three, and deliberately so. There’s no control panel to log into, no shell, and no WordPress installation of your own sitting there collecting plugins that need patching every Tuesday.

Every site here is built by our own team on one platform that we update centrally, which is precisely why the hosting costs what it does and why so little goes wrong with it.

What you get instead is your dashboard, where prices, photographs, business hours and the words on any page are yours to change in a few clicks, and our team to make the changes you’d rather not make yourself: two a month on Basic, as many as you send on Complete.

If what you want is a server to log into and tinker with at two in the morning, we’re the wrong supplier, and would rather say so here than after you have paid.

Usually we rebuild it instead of lifting it across as it stands. This is hosting for sites our own team has built, on one platform we tune, which is exactly why it costs what it does.

If the site you have isn’t earning its keep, a redesign puts a new one on this hosting for the same $1, keeps your words and your rankings, and redirects the old addresses so nothing you have earned goes missing.

What a website redesign should fix is a fair test of whether to do it at all.

In United States data centers, encrypted in transit and at rest.

Inquiries from your contact form, your customer list and your content belong to you, and are never sold or used to advertise anything to anyone.

The full detail of what we hold and why is written out in our privacy notice.

Tell us in any month and that’s the end of it. No notice period, no minimum term, no fee for leaving.

We send you your files and your content, the domain is registered in your name so it was always yours to take elsewhere, and we’ll point it wherever you ask.

Nothing is held hostage to make going somewhere else expensive.