All systems operational — taking new clients
Hosting, servers & DevOps —
without the 3am panic.
If your site lives on cheap shared hosting and breaks in ways nobody owns, this page is for you. I set up and manage proper server infrastructure for UK businesses — managed hosting, VPS setup, Docker deployments, and server migrations — on hardware I run myself. Monitored around the clock, backed up nightly, and looked after by the same developer who answers your email.
The Problem
The £2.99 false economy.
Cheap hosting isn't cheap. It just moves the cost somewhere harder to see — into the Tuesday afternoon your site went down, the support chat that went nowhere, the pages that load in six seconds, and the developer you paid emergency rates to patch it all up.
The deeper problem isn't the hardware. It's that nobody owns the outcome. The host blames the site, the developer blames the host, and you're the one refreshing the page hoping it comes back.
Businesses waste an average of $418 a month resolving hosting problems, and 2 in 5 regret their last switch — Liquid Web, 2025.
What I Run
Six services. Racked and priced.
No vague “cloud solutions”. Six concrete kinds of work, each with a price anchor. If your problem lives on a server, it's almost certainly one of these.
- from £30/month
Managed Hosting
Your site on hardware I run and stand behind — a proper Hetzner VPS, not bargain-bin shared hosting. SSL, nightly backups, monitoring, and security patches all included. When something needs fixing, you email me — and I already know your stack.
Typical — WordPress sites, WooCommerce stores, web apps — ones I've built, or ones someone else built and walked away from.
- from £200
VPS Setup & Hardening
A production-ready server from a blank slate: Ubuntu LTS, SSH keys only, firewall, fail2ban, automatic security updates — then Nginx or a full Docker stack on top. You get root, documentation, and a server you can actually trust.
Typical — developers and startups graduating from shared hosting; businesses that want their own box without becoming sysadmins.
- from £400
Docker & Coolify Deployment
Push-to-deploy infrastructure on your own VPS — Coolify as a self-hosted Heroku, every app in its own container, SSL automatic, databases managed. PaaS convenience at roughly a tenth of the bill.
Typical — teams outgrowing Heroku, Render, or Netlify pricing; multiple apps consolidated onto one server.
- from £250
Server Migrations
Out of a bad host, cleanly: site, database, and email records mapped, the cutover planned, nothing lost in transit. The old host stays live until the new one is proven — zero-downtime by design.
Typical — escaping slow shared hosting; cPanel-to-cPanel moves; WordPress from shared hosting to a VPS.
- from £250
Self-Hosted Tools
n8n, Nextcloud, Mattermost, booking and CRM tools — running on your own server, with your data under your control. Self-hosted n8n costs about €5 a month to run; the cloud version is $50–200+.
Typical — replacing stacking SaaS subscriptions; automation platforms; privacy-sensitive internal tooling.
- from £400
DevOps & CI/CD
Pipelines, environments, and deployment automation for teams that have outgrown “drag it into FTP” — GitHub Actions, staging that mirrors production, and deploys boring enough to run on a Friday.
Typical — small dev teams without a DevOps hire; agencies that want a deployment partner behind the scenes.
The 3am Test
Good infrastructure works the night shift.
Anyone can sell you a server. The difference is what happens when something goes wrong at 3am — and eventually, something always does.
Every server I manage is monitored around the clock. Most failures heal themselves: a container restarts, the service comes back, the incident gets logged. The rare ones that need a human wake me — not you.
Uptime isn't luck. It's monitoring, tested backups, and someone who actually reads the alerts.
Managed Hosting
One monthly fee. Everything handled.
The flagship arrangement: your site on my infrastructure, with the whole operational burden — certificates, backups, monitoring, patching, and fixing — carried by one accountable person. From £30 a month.
- Hetzner VPS hardware — fast NVMe storage, EU datacentres
- SSL certificates — issued and renewed automatically, forever
- Nightly backups — with restores actually tested, not assumed
- Uptime monitoring — alerts go to me, not to you
- Security patches & hardening — handled as routine, not as emergencies
- One person, every time — the developer who knows your whole stack
Most of my clients pair a website build with managed hosting. Everything lives under one roof — and when something needs updating or fixing, I already know your stack.
The Stack
What your hosting actually runs on.
No reseller accounts, no white-labelled mystery boxes, no cPanel from 2009. The stack is deliberately modern and deliberately simple — and I run my own production systems on exactly this setup, including the site you're reading now.
Hetzner for the hardware: German-engineered datacentres, EU data residency, and the best price-to-performance in Europe. Coolify and Docker for the deployment layer: every app in its own container, SSL automatic via Let's Encrypt, push-to-deploy from Git. And for low-traffic internal tools, I'll happily put Oracle Cloud's free tier to work — four CPUs and 24GB of RAM for £0 is a hard deal to argue with.
If a £3 shared plan genuinely covers your needs, I'll tell you to keep it. This stack is for when it doesn't.
Ways In
Three kinds of people email me.
Process
From first call to boring.
Boring is the goal — servers you never think about. Five stages, and the last one deliberately never finishes.
-
Infrastructure review
A 20-minute call: what you're running, what it costs, and what's quietly at risk. Free, and useful even if we never speak again.
-
Recommendation
A right-sized plan with a fixed quote. Sometimes the honest answer is “stay where you are” — you'll get that answer too.
-
Setup & migration
Provision, harden, migrate, test — then a planned DNS cutover. The old host stays live until the new one is proven.
-
Monitor & maintain
Backups nightly, patches applied, uptime watched around the clock. The boring bit — which is exactly the point.
-
You email me
One contact for everything afterwards. No ticket queues, no tiers, no “have you tried clearing your cache?”
Investment
What does it cost?
Open numbers, because guessing games waste everyone's time. A realistic guide to what the work typically costs:
- Managed hosting (per site) From £30/mo
- VPS setup & hardening From £200
- Server migration From £250
- Docker / Coolify deployment stack From £400
- Self-hosted tool setup (n8n, Nextcloud…) From £250
- CI/CD pipeline setup From £400
- DevOps consulting £65/hour
Managed hosting is quoted per site and depends on traffic, storage, and how much hand-holding the stack needs. Project work is a fixed quote after a short scoping call — you know the number before anything starts.
Questions
Asked before. Answered straight.
If yours isn't here, ask it — the worst case is an honest answer you didn't expect.
Can you host my existing WordPress site?
Yes — WordPress is most of what I host. Migration is part of the setup: I move the site and database, test everything on the new server, then cut DNS over once it's proven. Most sites get noticeably faster in the process, because a proper VPS outruns shared hosting without trying.
What happens if something breaks at 3am?
Monitoring catches it, and in most cases the stack heals itself — a container restarts, the service comes back, and the incident is logged for the morning report. If it genuinely needs a human, the alert wakes me, not you. You find out from my summary, not from a customer.
Am I locked in? Can I take my server with me?
No lock-in, ever. The server, the code, and the data are yours, and everything I set up is documented. If you ever want to move on — to another provider or another developer — I'll hand it all over cleanly and help with the transition.
Do I actually need a VPS, or will shared hosting do?
Honest answer: not always. If you have a low-traffic brochure site and a £5 plan that behaves itself, keep it — I'll tell you exactly that on the review call. The moment your site earns money, or downtime costs you sales or reputation, proper infrastructure pays for itself quickly.
What's the difference between managed and unmanaged hosting?
Unmanaged means you rent the hardware and you're the sysadmin — updates, security, backups, and 3am problems are all yours. Managed means I'm the sysadmin: I patch it, back it up, monitor it, and fix it. You run your business; I run the servers.
All systems operational.
Except yours?
The infrastructure review takes 20 minutes, costs nothing, and ends with straight answers: what you're running, what it should cost, and what's quietly at risk. If your setup is already fine, I'll tell you that too — and you've lost nothing but the 20 minutes.
20-minute review, free No lock-in, ever UK-based, remote worldwide