I need help with hosting.

All the guides

There are nine guides, in three groups. They assume you run a business rather than a server, and that what you want is to know what to check, in what order, and what to ask for.

No sign up, no newsletter, no video. If a page does not start answering your question in its first few lines, it has failed you.

Something has stopped working

The pages people arrive at in a hurry. What to check, in order, and what to tell whoever you pay.

My website is down

Is it just you, has the domain lapsed, or has the host stopped serving it?

Email is not arriving

Mail that bounces, vanishes or lands in spam, and the four records behind it.

The browser says my site is not secure

What the warning actually means, and the five things that cause it.

My WordPress site has been hacked

The first hour, in order, and the one thing not to do.

Getting control back

Most hosting trouble is really a question of who holds the keys. These are about finding out.

Who actually controls your domain

Owning a domain and being able to change it are two different things.

The person who set it up has gone

How to work out where everything lives, and get it back into your name.

Moving to a new host without breaking anything

The order that keeps the site and the email running on the day.

Choosing and looking after it

Before anything goes wrong. Short, and written to be read before you sign up for anything.

What kind of hosting you actually need

Shared, managed, a server of your own, and which one a small business needs.

Are you actually backed up?

The questions to ask before you need the answer.

Why these

Written by the person who gets the phone call afterwards.

Every guide here started as an explanation given to a real business owner on the day something went wrong. The bias throughout is towards the safe step before the clever one, and towards saying plainly when something needs a person rather than a support article.