Website hosting matters as much as your website.
A great website on bad hosting is still a bad website: speed and crawlability are crucial if you are going to get cited by AI.
Why hosting matters more than most people think.
We spend a lot of time building fast, clean, well-structured websites. Cheap hosting undoes all of that.
Page speed is a ranking factor. A slow server adds seconds to your load time regardless of how well the site is built. A Google PageSpeed score of 95 on good hosting can drop to the 50s on a shared server with 500 other sites crammed onto it.
Hosting is also where your site lives. If it goes down, your business goes dark. If it gets hacked and there are no proper backups, you can lose everything.
We only put our sites on hosting we would trust with our own business. That means managed WordPress hosting from providers like WP Engine, Kinsta, and Cloudways – not the names you find when you Google “best web hosting”, which are almost always cheap affiliate-link recommendations written by people who have never built a serious website in their lives.
What cheap hosting actually costs you.
Paying £3 a month for hosting feels like a saving. It is not.
Budget shared hosting puts your site on a server alongside hundreds or thousands of other websites. When those sites get busy, yours slows down. When one of them gets hacked, your site is at risk too.
These hosts also have minimal support for WordPress specifically. No automatic updates, no staging environments, no one-click restores from daily backups. When something goes wrong – and at some point, something always does – you are on your own.
The cost of a website going down for a day, or getting hacked and needing to be restored from scratch, will always exceed the difference between cheap hosting and good hosting. Every single time.
What managed WordPress hosting gives you.
Managed WordPress hosting is built specifically for WordPress. Everything else is a compromise.
Here is what good hosting actually looks like:
- Server-level caching – pages load faster because the heavy lifting happens before the request even reaches WordPress
- Daily automated backups – with one-click restore, so if anything goes wrong you are back up in minutes, not days
- Staging environments – test updates and changes on a copy of your site before they go live, so there are no nasty surprises
- Automatic WordPress core updates – keeping your site secure without you having to think about it
- Built-in security scanning – catching threats before they become problems
- CDN included – your site loads quickly for visitors anywhere in the world, not just near the server
- WordPress-specific support – when you call for help, you are talking to someone who actually knows WordPress
Hosting has always been on your optimisation checklist.
When you go to the time and expense of building a new site or rebuilding an old one to be optimised for AI, there’s little point in hosting it on a £ 5-per-month, slow AF server.
We provide fully managed and optimised hosting for businesses that want to get recommended by AI.
Toast’s management of the migration of my two very large websites has been seamless.
They have handled everything from start to finish, totally taking the pressure off.
I can’t recommend Toast Design Agency enough! If you’re looking for a team that truly understands the intricacies of website migration and delivers outstanding, hassle-free results, look no further. Their expertise and attention to detail made the entire process stress-free! Happy Customer!
Frequently asked questions about website hosting
What does hosting cost?
We have a range of hosting packages tailored to different types of sites, clients, and requirements. Our base hosting packages are charged at £35 + VAT per month.
Are websites backed up?
Yes, daily across all our hosting accounts, with one-click backup and restore options on higher-tier accounts.
Do I have access to the hosting?
If you want FPT or direct console access for your hosting account, we can set that up for you.
Is the hosting monitored?
We monitor all our clients’ sites for uptime and post-update issues. This is an automated task that then notifies us if there is an issue with one of the sites we host.
Is my site hosted in the UK?
We use Google Data Centres in London for the majority of sites we host, some are hosted in Europe and the US if this best suits the site’s reach.
Is an SSL certificate included?
Full SSL certificates are included in our hosting plans and are not charged as extras.
Do you host email?
No, there are better services for that, such as Google Workspace or Office 365. We recommend keeping these two essential business services separate.
Are there storage limits?
Yes – it’s best not to use your WordPress site as a file repository, so our accounts are limited – this also helps ensure our servers are fast. We can accommodate sites of any size, with small additional fees for extra storage.
Can you move my site?
Yes, this is included in the hosting charges – we’ll migrate the site and take care of all the DNS updates and post-migration checks.
Sites that we host for our clients
Examples of sites we’ve built and host
Building huge websites for marketing teams
A large corporate site for Zenloop as part of a project to move them off their previous CMS and open the site to easy management by the marketing team.
WP, bookings & Woo for historic brewery
We helped Hooky move online when the stores were all closed, creating a business-boosting custom WP and WOO site.
Creating professional websites for small charities
A marketing and information site for a small London-based charity. This project helped the charity increase it reach and the great work it delivers.
Complex subscription app and website
Building a website for a clever piece of software for writers. The site has complex API functions and member areas.
Building a large corporate group website on WordPress
The flagship corporate site for Lanas, custom-built by us on WordPress as part of a 15-site project.
New brand and growth platform for a Therapist
Building a WordPress-powered marketing platform for a professional therapist.
Building credibility for a finance firm
Building an optimised WordPress site to act as a marketing platform for a finance firm.
Rebuilding DCR London to rank in organic and AI searches
Reworking an existing Wix website to improve SEO, conversions and new business.
The Victorian Society website design and build
We helped the Victorian Society by delivering a website built for future growth and easy content management.
Hosting and performance are the same conversation.
We start every new build by running the blank theme through Google PageSpeed Insights. We aim for 100 out of 100 before a single line of content goes in.
That discipline only pays off on hosting that can keep up with it.
When we set up hosting for a client site, we configure the server environment to match how the site is built – caching rules, PHP version, database optimisation, and CDN configuration. It is not a case of picking a plan and pointing a domain at it.
The combination of a clean bespoke build and properly configured managed hosting is what produces PageSpeed scores in the high 90s consistently. One without the other always leaves performance on the table.
Already on bad hosting?
Moving a WordPress site to better hosting is straightforward when you know what you are doing. We handle the whole thing.
We migrate your site to a properly configured managed hosting environment, set up your DNS correctly using Cloudflare, test everything thoroughly on the new server before switching over, and make sure there is zero downtime during the move.
If your site is currently on Ionos, GoDaddy, Hostgator, or any other budget shared host, the difference in speed and reliability after a migration to managed hosting is immediate and measurable.
You do not need to be a Toast build client to use our hosting service. If you have an existing WordPress site and want it on better infrastructure, we can help.
