Hosting is the one line in a website’s budget that nobody talks about until it causes trouble. It cannot be seen, it is never shown to a client, and yet it determines how fast pages load, whether the site stays up, how well it withstands attacks and whether it can be recovered after an incident. This page sets out what serious website hosting means for a business in Pau, in south west France, what separates one offer from another, and how a migration actually unfolds.
What your hosting decides for you
The same WordPress site, copied identically onto two different hosts, can load in eight tenths of a second or in four seconds. The content has not changed, nor has the theme. What has changed is the processing power allocated, the PHP version, whether there is an object cache, the quality of the disk and the number of sites sharing the same machine.
That difference is not cosmetic. Google measures the speed visitors actually experience and factors it into its rankings. More to the point, a visitor on an average mobile connection gives up well before the fourth second. You are not losing a ranking, you are losing a lead.
Hosting also decides what happens when things go wrong. A daily backup kept off the server means a site can be back online within the hour. No backup at all turns a routine incident into a rebuild from scratch.
Shared, private server, managed cloud
Three families of hosting share the market, and they are not aimed at the same needs.
Shared hosting puts several hundred sites on the same machine. It is cheap, and perfectly adequate for a personal site. The drawback is structural: a neighbor’s load slows your site down, and you have no hand whatsoever in the configuration.
A virtual private server reserves dedicated resources for you. It is a real leap in performance, but the administration falls to you: system updates, security, web server configuration. Without systems skills, the machine quietly deteriorates.
Managed cloud combines dedicated resources with complete handling of the administration. It is what we use for the sites we look after: guaranteed resources, PHP kept up to date, an object cache, a web application firewall, an SSL certificate renewed automatically and daily backups, without the client ever having to type a single command. The detailed comparison of the three families is in our guide to shared, VPS and cloud hosting.
What hosting includes for the sites we look after
It is not sold separately: it is part of the subscription, because hosting split off from maintenance creates exactly the gap in responsibility we are trying to avoid.
In practice, each site has a cloud server with dedicated resources located in Europe, a PHP version kept current, a server cache and an in-memory object cache, a content delivery network for static files, an SSL certificate renewed without anyone lifting a finger, a web application firewall filtering out automated attacks, daily backups kept off the server, and uptime monitoring that raises an alert before you have noticed the problem.
On top of that comes the thing no spec sheet lists: someone is watching. An unusual spike in load, a plugin consuming far more than it should, a disk filling up with forgotten log files: these are signals a machine on its own does not deal with.
Where the electricity comes from, without the greenwashing
A data center uses electricity to run its machines, and roughly as much again to cool them. The ratio between the two is measured by an energy efficiency indicator: the closer it gets to 1, the leaner the facility. An older data center tops out at around 1.8; a modern installation gets below 1.2.
The second question is where the electricity comes from. A supply genuinely drawn from renewable sources is one thing; a carbon offset bought after the fact to balance the books is another. The latter has its uses, but it does not reduce consumption in the slightest.
Our sites run on infrastructure powered by renewable energy, and 1% of the agency’s turnover goes to marine restoration programs. The commitment does not stop at the server: a lighter site uses less energy on every visit, which counts for more than a badge displayed in the footer. The criteria for checking a claim are set out in our article on what to look for in genuinely green hosting.
Migrating an existing site, with no downtime
Migration worries people, often with good reason, because it is so regularly botched. The procedure we follow comes down to five steps.
A complete copy of the site is first installed on the new server, files and database included. It is then tested at a temporary address: pages, forms, checkout, outgoing email. The caching time on the domain’s DNS records is lowered the day before the switchover, so the change propagates within a few minutes. Finally the domain is switched over, and the old hosting is kept for several days as a fallback before being closed down.
Throughout the operation, the site stays reachable. Not a day of downtime, not a broken address, not a lost ranking: the existing redirects are carried over exactly as they were.
Does a Pau business need a server close to home?
Not exactly, and it is better to say so plainly than to sell a proximity argument that is nothing of the kind. What matters for a visitor in Pau is that the server is in Europe and that the cache is properly configured. The difference between a server in Paris and a server in Frankfurt is imperceptible.
The proximity that counts lies elsewhere: it is human. When a site goes down, what matters is reaching someone who knows your setup, in your language and in your time zone, rather than a support form whose answer arrives the next day. That is the proximity we offer, and it holds just as well for a client in Pau as for a client in Lisbon.
Taking stock of your current hosting
Three questions are enough to know where you stand. Do you know which version of PHP your site runs on? When was a backup last restored, even just as a test? And in whose name is your domain registered?
If any one of the three goes unanswered, a review is worth having. Write to us or book a slot. Hosting is included in the website subscriptions, and technical follow-up in our WordPress maintenance in Pau.
Also worth reading: Web hosting: how to choose the right host for your site
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