Nearly every site I have been asked to rescue was fine on launch day. What broke it was eighteen months of nothing: no updates, backups nobody had ever restored, a certificate that quietly expired, and a plugin with a published vulnerability sitting on the checkout page.
None of that is a hosting failure in the technical sense. The server was up the whole time. What was missing was somebody whose job it was to look.
R79 a month buys you a server, not a service
Budget shared hosting is genuinely fine for a personal site. What it does not include is anyone testing the backups, applying the updates, watching the uptime graph, or answering at 21:00 on a Sunday when the store stops taking payments.
Price those hours honestly and the gap between cheap hosting and a managed plan gets small very quickly, particularly if you have ever paid for a malware cleanup.
A backup you have not restored is not a backup
The most common discovery during an audit is a backup system that has been dutifully writing corrupt or partial archives for a year. Nobody noticed, because nobody ever tried to use one.
Restore-test quarterly, to a staging environment, and write down how long it took. That number is your real recovery time, and it is usually a surprise.
Match the plan to the cost of an hour offline
For a brochure site, an hour of downtime costs approximately nothing, and a basic plan with daily backups is correct. For a store taking orders every hour, the same outage has a rand figure attached, and hourly backups plus a four-hour response are cheap by comparison.
Work out what an hour offline costs you, then buy the plan that matches. That single calculation makes the whole comparison table straightforward.
If you take four things away
- You are buying the maintenance around the server, not the server
- Restore-test backups quarterly or assume you do not have them
- Price an hour of downtime, then match the plan to that number
- Updates, certificates and monitoring belong on a schedule, not a to-do list
Get the next one when it lands.
Questions about anything in this piece? Email me directly.
Next: Design systems for teams of one
