Web hosting company in Newcastle, NSW: your website online, fast, and yours.

Hosting is the space your website files sit in, on a computer that is always on. Your domain name is the address people type. They are two separate things, usually bought from two separate companies.

A working website needs a few separate things in place, and mixing them up is where most of the confusion starts.

The parts, and which is which

• The domain name. The address people type. You rent it, usually a year at a time, and it should be registered in your business name.
• The hosting. The always on computer your pages sit on. This is the monthly bill people mean when they say hosting.
• The website itself. The files and pictures. They are yours, and on our hosting a copy is yours to take whenever you want one.

Uptime, which is the share of time your site is actually reachable, is what a host is really selling. Everything else on the invoice protects that number, including the backup, which is a saved copy you can put back when something goes wrong.

A slow site loses people before they read anything, and an offline site loses the enquiry entirely. Both happen quietly, at times you are not watching, which is why nobody notices until a customer mentions it.

Somebody searches on a phone, taps your site, and waits. If the first thing readable takes more than a couple of seconds, a good share of people go back and tap the next result. They never see your work, your prices or your reviews.

Speed is also one of the things Google reads when it ranks a page, so it shows up in two places rather than one.

What hosting decides

• How fast the page starts. Cheap shared hosting puts hundreds of sites on one machine. When one of them is busy, yours is slow.
• Whether it is up at all. Uptime is a number a host either publishes or does not, and which of those it is tells you something on its own.
• How quickly it comes back. Things break everywhere. The difference is whether somebody notices at two in the morning or you do at nine.

A certificate so the padlock shows, automatic backups kept somewhere separate, software updates applied, and somebody watching whether the site is up. A fee that covers none of those is buying disk space, which is a different product.

Hosting bills look identical and cover wildly different things. This is the list to ask about by name.

What ours covers

• An SSL certificate, which is what puts the padlock in the address bar. Included, and it renews itself. It has been a free part of hosting for years.
• Automatic backups, kept off the same machine. Daily, held for a few weeks, and restorable without opening a support ticket.
• Software updates. If your site runs on WordPress or anything similar, the updates are what keep it from being broken into.
• Monitoring. Somebody or something checking the site is up, and telling a human when it is not.

Managed hosting is the phrase for the version where those are included, which means someone else applies the updates and watches the backups rather than you. It costs more per month than bare disk space, and the difference is the week something breaks.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre's small business basics put backups and updates at the top of the list for the same reason.

Whoever is listed as the registrant owns it, and on plenty of Newcastle domains that is a designer or an old staff account. It is worth reading that field now rather than on the day you need to move something.

This is one of the more common things we find, and it surfaces at the worst moment. A business decides to change web designers and finds the domain is registered to the designer rather than to them.

For an .au domain there are eligibility rules about who can hold one, published by auDA, the body that runs .au. They tie the registrant to an Australian business, which is where the ABN comes in.

Two other things live in the same place. DNS, which is the setting that points your domain at your website and your email, and the renewal date. A domain that quietly lapses takes the website and the email with it.

Worth checking today

• Whose name the domain is registered in. The registrant field, read rather than assumed.
• Whether it renews automatically. And whether the card on file still exists.
• Who else has access. Anybody who has left, or any agency you no longer use.

Take a full backup, put a copy on the new host and test it before anything is switched, then point the domain across on a quiet morning and leave the old host running for a fortnight.

1. Find out what you actually have

The domain, the hosting, the email, and who has the logins for each. They are often in three different places and two different names.

2. Take a full backup and keep it yourself

The whole site and its database, downloaded, on your own computer. Do this before anybody touches anything.

3. Build the copy on the new host and test it

The new host serves a working copy before the domain moves. Click through every page, send the contact form, check the pictures load.

4. Move email separately, and carefully

Email is the part that goes wrong. If it is on the same domain, plan that move on its own day rather than as a footnote to the website.

5. Switch the domain on a quiet morning

Not a Friday afternoon. The change takes a few hours to reach everybody, so give yourself a working day either side of it.

6. Leave the old host running a while after

It costs one more month of hosting, and it is what turns a missed file into a five minute fix. Cancel once you are certain, not once it looks fine.

Tracking down the logins takes longer than the move does. The copy and the testing come next, the switch itself is one morning, and things settle shortly after.

The order it happens in

• Everything gets found and written down. The domain, the hosting, the email and who holds each login. A list most businesses have never had.
• A working copy is built and tested. Page by page, on the new host, while the live site carries on untouched.
• The domain is pointed across. On a quiet morning, with email moved as its own job. For a few hours different people see different versions.

The old host stays paid for a while after. If anything was missed, that is the difference between a five minute fix and a rebuild.

Ask whose name the domain will be in, what the fee includes, how often backups run, and whether you can take a copy and leave. The answers separate hosting from being held.

We do this work in Newcastle, so we are not neutral. These are the questions we would want asked of us.

• Whose name is the domain registered in? The business, tied to its ABN. Ours go in the client's name and we show the registrant field rather than describe it.
• What is included in the fee? Certificate, backups, updates and monitoring. Anything charged on top of the monthly figure is part of the price too.
• How often are backups taken, and how far back do they go? Ours run daily, are kept for weeks, and restore without a support queue.
• Can I take a copy of my site and leave? With us, yes, whenever, without a fee. It is the answer that decides how the rest of them read.
• Who do I call when it is down? A person, with the hours written down and what happens outside them. Ours is a phone number, not a form.

Plenty of Newcastle businesses host perfectly well on a big overseas provider and never think about it. That is a fine answer, as long as the domain is in the business name and somebody is taking backups.