Security and Hardening
Making a site survive the automated traffic every public site receives, and cleaning up properly when something has already got in.
Server Management
Hosting that is administered rather than merely rented: the server, the control panel, the certificates, the backups, and the mail.
Renting a server and running one are different things. A control panel login is not administration, and most small businesses discover the gap at the worst possible moment — when a certificate expires, a backup turns out to be empty, or invoices stop arriving because the domain has no DMARC record.
Server work sits underneath everything else. A slow site, a bounced invoice, and a failing import look like three separate problems until somebody can look at all three at once.
What you get
- Server and control panel configured deliberately, with the reasoning written down
- TLS certificates issued and renewing automatically, with HTTPS enforced
- Security headers applied at the server level, not just in the application
- Backups that have been tested by actually restoring one
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured so business mail is trusted
- Compression and caching configured correctly for the content being served
- Monitoring for uptime and certificate expiry
How the work is done
Find out what is actually there first
Inherited servers accumulate: old accounts, forgotten cron jobs, PHP versions nothing uses, DNS records pointing at services that no longer exist. Knowing what is running comes before changing any of it.
A backup is not a backup until it has been restored
An untested backup is an assumption. Restoring one is the only way to find out that it has been silently excluding a directory for eight months.
Mail deliverability is configuration, not luck
Business mail landing in spam is almost always missing or wrong SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. It is fixable, and it is worth fixing before it costs an invoice.
Write down what was changed
A server whose configuration only exists in one person's memory is a risk regardless of how well it is configured.
What this does not cover
This covers Linux hosting — cPanel and WHM, Apache, nginx, and the services around them. It does not cover Windows Server, office networks, desktop support, or telephony. Those are a different trade and are better handled by someone who does them daily.
Questions
We already have hosting. Do we have to move?
No. Most of this work happens on whatever host you are already using. Moving is only worth raising when the current host is the actual problem.
What happens if the server goes down at 2am?
That depends on what you need and what you want to pay for — there is a real difference between monitored hosting and a 24-hour response commitment. It is worth agreeing explicitly rather than assuming.
Can you work with our current hosting provider?
Yes. Working through an existing provider's support is a normal part of this, particularly for anything that needs root access on managed hosting.
Related
Performance and Core Web Vitals
Finding out why a site is slow and fixing the cause, including the parts that live on the server rather than in the page.
Maintenance and Support
Ongoing care for sites and applications, so problems are found before a customer finds them.
Have a system that needs building or fixing?
Describe the problem and you will get a direct answer about whether it is worth doing, roughly what it involves, and what it would take.
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