Web hosting company in Newcastle, NSW: 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 pieces in place, and mixing them up is where most of the confusion about this starts.

The parts, and which is which

• The domain name people type.

  The address itself. You rent it, usually a year at a time, and it should be registered in the business name.

• The hosting it sits on.

  The always on computer your pages live on. That is the monthly bill people mean when they say hosting.

• The website files themselves.

  The pages and the pictures. They belong to the business, and a copy is yours to take whenever you want one.

What a host is really selling is uptime, meaning the share of time your site is actually reachable. Everything else on the invoice exists to protect that number.

A slow site loses people before they read anything, and an offline site loses the enquiry entirely. Both happen quietly, at times nobody is watching, which is why a customer usually notices first.

Hosting and upkeep are separate purchases and get quoted separately here, so what upkeep costs is a number of its own rather than something folded into the hosting line.

Somebody searches on a phone, taps your site, and waits. Where the first readable thing takes more than a couple of seconds, a good share of people go back and tap the next result instead.

They never see the work, the prices or the reviews. Speed is also one of the things Google reads when it ranks a page, so it costs the business in two places rather than one.

What the hosting decides

• How fast the page starts loading.

  Cheap shared hosting puts hundreds of sites on one machine. On the day one of them is busy, yours is the slow one.

• Whether the site 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 up.

  Things break everywhere. Somebody notices at two in the morning, instead of the owner 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 covering none of those is buying disk space.

Hosting bills look identical to each other and cover wildly different things. This is the list worth asking about by name.

What a fee should cover

• An SSL certificate for the padlock.

  That is what puts the padlock in the address bar. It renews itself, and it has been a free part of hosting for years.

• Automatic backups kept off the machine.

  Taken daily, held for a few weeks, and restorable without having to open a support ticket to ask.

• The software updates, where they apply.

  Where a site runs on WordPress or anything similar, the updates are what keep it from being broken into.

• Somebody or something monitoring it.

  Checking the site is actually up, and telling a human when it is not, rather than waiting for a customer.

Managed hosting is the phrase for the version where all of those are included, meaning somebody else applies the updates and watches the backups. It costs more than bare disk space, and it shows in the week something breaks.

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

A site that is down is a different job to hosting it, and four causes account for nearly all of them.

This is one of the more common things that turns up, and it surfaces at the worst possible moment. A business decides to change designers and finds the domain is registered to the designer.

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 pointing 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. It takes about two minutes to look up properly.

• Whether it renews itself automatically.

  And whether the card sitting on file against it still exists and has not expired.

• Who else still has access to it.

  Anybody who has left the business, or any agency the business no longer works with.

Take a full backup, put a working copy on the new host and test it page by page, then point the domain across on a quiet morning. The old host stays running for a fortnight after that.

Nothing here is dramatic. The whole method is doing the switching after the testing rather than before it.

1. What actually exists gets found

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

2. A full backup gets taken and kept

The whole site and its database, downloaded, on a computer the business controls. This happens before anybody touches anything at all.

3. Build and test the copy on the new host

The new host serves a working copy before the domain moves. Every page clicked, the contact form sent, the pictures checked.

4. Email moves separately and carefully

Email is the part that goes wrong. Where it is on the same domain, that move gets its own day rather than being a footnote to the website.

5. The domain switches on a quiet morning

Never a Friday afternoon. The change takes a few hours to reach everybody, so it wants a working day either side of it.

6. The old host stays running a while

It costs one more month, and it is what turns a missed file into a five minute fix. It stops once things are certain, not once they look fine.

Tracking down the logins takes longer than the move itself. The copy and the testing come next, the switch is one morning, and everything settles shortly afterwards.

The order it happens in

• First everything gets found and written down.

  The domain, the hosting, the email and who holds each login. It is a list most businesses have never had.

• Then a working copy is built and tested.

  Page by page, on the new host, while the live site carries on completely untouched.

• Then the domain points 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 afterwards. Where anything was missed, a five minute fix becomes 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.

These are worth asking of any host, including this one, so the answers given here are underneath each question.

• Whose name is the domain registered in?

  The business's, tied to its ABN. It goes in the client's name here, and you see that field itself rather than a description of 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?

  Daily here, kept for weeks, and restorable without having to join a support queue for it.

• Can I take a copy of my site and leave?

  Yes, whenever, and with no fee attached. That answer is the one deciding how all the others read.

• Who do I call when it is down?

  A person, with the hours written down and what happens outside them. It is a phone number here rather than 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.

For an edit that cannot wait, same day website changes covers what can genuinely be done today and what holds it up.