Red Rock Local Business Blog

Moving hosts without the headache

2026-09-16T00:00:00Z

Plenty of business owners stay with a hosting company they're unhappy with because moving sounds risky. What if the site goes down? What if email stops working? What if something gets lost?

Those are fair worries. The good news is that a well-planned move is invisible to your customers. It just has to happen in the right order.

Step 1: Take stock

Before touching anything, make a note of:

Where your domain name is registered (often, but not always, the same company as your hosting)
Where your email is hosted
Your login details for the website, the hosting control panel and the domain registrar

Email is the one that catches people out. If your email comes from your current host, it needs its own plan.

Step 2: Copy, don't move

The new host makes a complete copy of your site on their servers while the old one keeps running. Nothing changes for visitors yet.

Step 3: Test on the new server

Every page, form and image gets checked on the new server before it goes live. This is where problems get caught, with no pressure because the live site is untouched.

Step 4: Switch the address

Once everything checks out, the domain's DNS records are updated to point at the new server. The change spreads across the internet over a few hours. During that window, some visitors see the old copy and some see the new one, which is why both need to be identical.

Step 5: Keep the old account for a week

Don't cancel the old hosting the same day. Leave it running for a week or so, in case anything was missed.

Or let us do it

When you host with us, migration is free and we do all five steps for you. You send us your website address and the logins, and we'll tell you when it's done.

Is your website fast enough for a phone in the car park?

2026-08-19T00:00:00Z

Picture your typical customer. They're probably not sitting at a desk with fast broadband. They're on a phone, in a car park or on a sidewalk, with two bars of signal, trying to find your opening hours before they decide where to go.

If your site takes eight seconds to load, they've already tapped on a competitor.

Five quick checks

You don't need special tools to get a rough idea of how your site performs:

Load it on your phone with Wi-Fi switched off. Count how long it takes before you can read something useful.
Run a free speed test. Google's PageSpeed Insights gives a score and a list of the biggest problems.
Look at your images. Photos straight from a camera can be 5MB or more each. On the web, most should be well under 300KB.
Count the extras. Chat widgets, social media feeds, pop-ups and tracking scripts all add weight.
Check the important stuff is near the top. Phone number, address and hours shouldn't need three scrolls to find.

What hosting has to do with it

Some speed problems live in the website itself, like oversized images or too many plugins. But a lot depend on where it's hosted:

Server response time. An overloaded shared server can take a second or more just to start sending the page.
Caching. Serving a ready-made copy of each page is far quicker than building it from scratch for every visitor.
A content delivery network (CDN). Copies of your site's files are stored in data centres around the world, so they travel a shorter distance to each visitor.

Every site we host gets caching and a global CDN as standard. If your site still feels slow after moving, we'll take a look and tell you, in plain English, what's holding it back.

Backups: the insurance you hope never to use

2026-07-15T00:00:00Z

Ask a small business owner if their website is backed up and the most common answer is "I think so?" The second most common is "the hosting company does that, doesn't it?"

Sometimes it does. Sometimes the backups exist but are stored on the same server as the site, so a hardware failure takes both. Sometimes they're a paid add-on that was never switched on. Most people find out which on the day something goes wrong.

What can go wrong

Websites break in surprisingly ordinary ways:

A plugin update conflicts with your theme and the site goes blank.
Someone on the team deletes a page they thought was unused.
A weak password lets an attacker in, and they deface the site or insert spam.
A server fails, as all hardware eventually does.

In every case, a recent backup turns a crisis into a minor annoyance.

What good backups look like

A sensible backup routine has three qualities:

Frequent. Daily is right for most small business sites. If you update the site several times a day, you may want more.
Off-site. Stored in a different location from the server, so one failure can't destroy both.
Tested. A backup you've never restored is a hope, not a plan.

How we handle it

Every site we host is backed up daily to separate storage, and we keep 30 days of copies. That means if something went wrong last Tuesday and nobody noticed until today, we can still roll back to before it happened.

Restoring is our job, not yours. You call or email, tell us roughly when the site last looked right, and we take it from there.

Why your site needs the padlock

2026-06-24T00:00:00Z

Look at the address bar on this page. See the small padlock, or the word "https" at the start of the address? That means the connection between your browser and our server is encrypted with an SSL certificate (technically TLS, but everyone still says SSL).

What it protects

Without encryption, anything typed into a website travels across the internet as plain text. On public Wi-Fi in a café or hotel, that can be read by someone on the same network. Contact forms, booking details and login passwords are all exposed.

With SSL, that information is scrambled in transit, so only your server can read it.

Why it matters even if you don't take payments

Plenty of small business owners assume SSL is only for online shops. Not any more:

Browsers warn visitors. Chrome, Safari and Firefox label sites without SSL as "Not secure." Many customers will leave rather than risk it.
Search engines prefer it. Google has used HTTPS as a ranking signal for years.
Modern features require it. Things like maps that use a visitor's location only work over HTTPS.

Certificates expire

An SSL certificate isn't a one-time purchase. Certificates expire, typically every few months, and an expired one is arguably worse than none: visitors get a full-screen warning telling them your site may be dangerous.

That's why we install and renew certificates automatically for every site we host. You shouldn't have to put a reminder in your calendar to keep your website trustworthy.

How to check yours

Visit your website and look at the address bar. If you see "Not secure," or if the address starts with http:// rather than https://, give us a call. Fixing it is usually a ten-minute job.

The real cost of “cheap” hosting

2026-06-03T00:00:00Z

You've seen the adverts: hosting from $2.99 a month. It sounds like a bargain, and for the first year it might be. The trouble starts when you read the small print, or when the renewal email arrives.

Where the price goes up

Budget hosting plans tend to make their money back in a few predictable ways:

Introductory pricing. The headline price often requires paying for one to three years up front, and renews at a much higher rate.
Add-ons at checkout. Backups, security scanning, privacy protection and email are frequently pre-ticked extras.
Paid migrations. Moving your existing site over can carry a one-off fee.
Premium support. Basic support might be a ticket queue; talking to a human can cost extra.

None of this is hidden, exactly. It's just easy to miss when you're busy running a business.

Do the three-year sum

Before you sign up anywhere, add up what you'd pay over three years, including:

The introductory period
The renewal price for the remaining time
Every add-on you'd actually need: backups, SSL, security
The cost of your time when something breaks

That last one is the easiest to forget. If a broken site costs you an afternoon of troubleshooting, or a weekend of lost bookings, the "cheap" plan has already cost more than it saved.

Our approach

We charge $35 a month, and that's the whole bill. Migration, SSL, daily backups, monitoring, updates and support are all included, and the price doesn't change at renewal because there's no introductory price to expire.

It's not the lowest number on the internet. But it's the number you'll actually pay, and it comes with someone who picks up the phone.

What does web hosting actually do?

2026-05-12T00:00:00Z

If your website were a shop, hosting would be the building it sits in. Your domain name (yourbusiness.com) is the street address. The website itself is the shop fittings and stock. Hosting is the land, the walls, the electricity and the lock on the door.

Every time a customer types your address or taps a link, their phone asks a computer somewhere, "send me this page." That computer is a server, and keeping it running, fast and safe is what a hosting company does.

The parts you never see

Good hosting involves a lot of quiet work:

Keeping the server online. Hardware fails, networks hiccup, and someone has to notice at 3am.
Applying security updates. New vulnerabilities turn up every week. Unpatched servers are the easiest targets on the internet.
Taking backups. Copies of your site stored somewhere else, so a mistake or an attack is an inconvenience, not a disaster.
Serving pages quickly. Caching and content delivery networks get your pages to customers' phones in a fraction of a second.
Managing certificates. The padlock in the browser bar needs renewing regularly, or visitors see a scary warning.

Why it matters to a small business

When hosting goes wrong, it usually goes wrong at the worst time: a busy Saturday, the week of a big promotion, the morning a journalist links to you. Customers who hit an error page rarely try twice.

Cheap hosting isn't always bad hosting, but very cheap hosting usually means one thing has been cut: the people. The servers might be fine until something breaks, and then you're on your own with a help forum.

What to look for

Whoever you host with, ask four questions:

How often are backups taken, and who restores them?
Is SSL included and renewed automatically?
What does it cost after the first year?
When something breaks, can I talk to a person?

If the answers are vague, keep looking. Your website is often the first impression a customer has of your business, and it deserves solid ground to stand on.