Your WordPress site or online store keeps running, even on the busiest day

Your site sits on a plan that costs a few euros a month and worked fine for years. Then came more products, a few plugins, a newsletter, and a chat window. Now a product page takes just a bit too long to load, your admin screen shows a notice about an outdated PHP version, and nobody dares press the update button. And the question that really matters, whether you can restore this morning's store if something goes wrong, has never been answered by anyone.

Why an online store needs different hosting

A WordPress site or online store is not a file on a server. It is a collection of separate parts that need each other every second: the core, some thirty plugins, a theme, a database of orders and customer details, and connections to your payment provider and your accounting. On a shared plan, you share computing power with hundreds of other sites and have no say in what the neighbors do. While it is quiet, you notice nothing. On the day you send a mailing or start a promotion, you do.

We put your site in its own environment, sized for what it actually does. For an informational site with ten thousand visitors a month, that is a modest machine. For an online store with hundreds of orders a day, we look at the database, the number of simultaneous checkouts, and the background tasks your software runs. It is the same approach as Managed hosting, but focused on WordPress and the store software that runs on it. The servers sit in our managed environments within the EU.

Updates that may fail somewhere else first

The most dangerous moment in the life of a WordPress site is the update. A plugin that has not been updated for a year is a risk, but updating it blindly on the live site is just as risky. That is why every environment comes with a test copy: the same site, the same plugins, the same data, just not visible to your customers. Updates go there first, we click through the ordering process there, and only when that works does it go to production.

We roll out security updates quickly, outside your working hours. Big version jumps, of your theme, your store software, or the PHP version underneath, we plan together with you and never in your busiest week. If a plugin falls behind because its maker has stopped, we say so and look for a replacement, instead of leaving it for years. The principle is boring, and that is exactly the point: no update should ever be a surprise.

Staying fast when it gets busy

Speed is not a luxury for an online store. A page that opens slowly costs you visitors before they have seen anything, and search engines hold it against you. We use caching on several layers: the page itself, the database queries, and the images, which we shrink automatically and serve in a modern format. We also remove what does not matter. The average site drags along plugins that nobody uses anymore and scripts that load on every page while only one form needs them.

If you have visitors far outside the Netherlands, or many heavy images and videos, we add CDN and edge caching, so the files come from closer to your visitor. If your catalog grows so much that the database becomes the bottleneck, it moves to its own environment through Managed databases. That is not a standard part of the plan. We propose it when the numbers call for it, and not before.

When something goes wrong anyway

Something will go wrong at some point. A bad import, a hacked plugin, a staff member who empties the wrong category. That is why we make a backup of your files and your database every day, keep it in a different location than the server itself, and restore one onto a test machine from time to time. A backup that has never been restored is a pile of files, not certainty. How far back you can go and how fast you are online again, we agree beforehand. If you want tighter agreements for your whole environment, our Backup and disaster recovery service covers that.

Monitoring looks at more than whether the server is on: whether the homepage still loads, whether checkout still works, whether the certificate is still valid, and whether the disk is filling up. If an alert fires, we follow the escalation recorded in the intake. And you are not locked in. The site, the domain, the database, and the documentation are yours. If you want to move to another provider in two years, you get a working copy instead of a goodbye talk. It starts with a free intake, where we will also simply tell you if your current hosting is fine.