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Hosting without support is just a landlord.

Server space is a commodity — you can buy it for the price of a coffee. What you can't buy for ten dollars is someone who notices the problem before you do, and who already knows how your site is put together when you call. Ours comes with both.

From $125/mo Canadian servers Support hours included Leave any time

In every plan

  • Canadian-hosted WordPress
  • Weekly core & plugin updates
  • Daily offsite backups
  • Uptime, SSL and security monitoring
  • Support hours, not just tickets
  • A named human who knows your site

One number. Not a base rate plus surprises.

The honest comparison

Cheap hosting isn't cheaper. It's unbundled.

Nine dollars a month buys you server space. Everything that keeps a WordPress site alive — updates, backups, monitoring, security, and someone to fix it — is still work, and it's still going to happen. It's just going to happen to you.

The real comparison isn't $9 against $125. It's $9 plus your Tuesday evening, plus the plugin conflict nobody caught, plus the month the backups weren't running.

the invoice is only half the price

Budget hosting
  • Server spaceyes
  • Core & plugin updatesyou
  • Backups verifiedyou
  • Uptime monitoringyou
  • Security hardeningyou
  • Who fixes it at 4pm Fridayyou
$9plus your evenings
Care plan
  • Server spaceCanadian
  • Core & plugin updatesweekly
  • Backups verifieddaily
  • Uptime monitoring24/7
  • Security hardeningincluded
  • Who fixes it at 4pm FridayJames
$125and your evenings back
Before you switch hosts

Is hosting actually your problem?

Often it isn't. "The site is slow" and "the site went down" get blamed on hosting because hosting is the easiest thing to change — but moving a broken site to a better server usually just relocates the problem. Five checks to find out.

01Is it slow everywhere, or slow on one page?
One slow page is not a hosting problem If the homepage loads fine and one page crawls, the cause is on that page: an enormous uncompressed image, an embedded map, a video player, a plugin doing something expensive. Fix the page. Moving hosts will make that page slightly less slow at considerably more cost.
02When did anyone last check the backups restore?
This is the one that actually bites Almost every host claims backups. Far fewer verify that a backup can be restored, and "we have backups" discovered to be false during an incident is the single most expensive thing on this page. Ask your host for the date of the last successful test restore. If nobody can answer, that's your real risk — and it's worth more than any speed difference.
03How many plugins are installed, and how many are actually used?
Plugin bloat, not server power Thirty-plus plugins on a brochure site is the most common cause of slow WordPress we see, and it's also a security surface. An afternoon of auditing and removing what's unused typically beats a hosting upgrade outright. Faster, cheaper, and it makes any future migration simpler.
04Do you know who has admin access right now?
Access problem — free to fix, today Old staff, a former agency, a contractor from 2019. If you can't list the accounts with admin rights, that's a bigger exposure than your server, and it costs nothing to fix: log in, review the user list, remove what shouldn't be there, turn on two-factor. Do this whether or not you ever talk to us.
05When something breaks, how long until a human who knows your site replies?
This is the part hosting plans don't sell If the answer is "we open a ticket and explain the site again," you don't have a hosting problem — you have a support problem, and no amount of server specification fixes it. This is the only item on the list where switching to us is genuinely the answer, and it's also the one nobody puts in a comparison table.

Scoring, honestly: if your noes are in 01, 03 or 04, spend a day fixing those before you move anything — you'll get most of the benefit for none of the migration risk. If 02 is a no, deal with it this week regardless of who hosts you. Only 05 is a reason to change providers on its own.

Answered all five comfortably

Stay where you are. Your hosting is doing its job and a migration would be motion without progress. Bookmark this and re-run it in a year.

What happens every month

The boring work, done reliably.

Nothing here is glamorous. All of it matters.

Keep it current

01 · Maintenance
  • Core & plugin updatesweekly
  • Applied on staging firstalways
  • Offsite backupsdaily
  • Restore testedquarterly

Updates on staging before production is the difference between an update and an outage. It's also why we can update weekly instead of hoarding six months of changes into one risky evening.

Watch it constantly

02 · Monitoring
  • Uptime checks24/7
  • SSL expiryalerted
  • Core Web Vitalstracked
  • Malware scanningdaily

The goal is finding out from a monitor rather than from a board member. Most months you'll never hear about any of this, which is the point.

Answer the phone

03 · Support
  • Included hours1–6/mo
  • First response<1 business day
  • Who repliesJames
  • Ticket queuenone

Your hours cover fixes, content changes and troubleshooting. Anything project-sized gets quoted first — you should never receive an invoice you didn't see coming.

Tell you the truth

04 · Reporting
  • Uptime summarymonthly
  • Work logitemised
  • Health reviewquarterly
  • Written foryour board

An itemised log of what was actually done, in language you can forward without translating. If a report needs me in the room to make sense, it's a bad report.

One day a year, this gets tested properly

The day the traffic came all at once.

Lemonade Stand Day · Stollery Children's Hospital

Lemonade Stand Day is a city-wide fundraiser for the Stollery — hundreds of kids, one website, and a whole city arriving at the same time. On event day the site took 11,083 visitors against a 2,150 daily average — a 5× surge, with donations flowing through it the entire time — and stayed up without a hiccup. That's what the monitoring, the staging discipline and the boring weekly work are actually for: the one day nothing is allowed to go wrong.

11,083
Visitors on event day
5×
The normal daily traffic
100%
Uptime through the surge — donations never stopped

Lemonade Stand Day, hosted and managed by Holler Digital · event-day figures from GA4

Most sites never see a day like this. Yours gets hosted like it might.

Pricing

Three plans. The difference is hours.

All CAD · month to month
Care
$125/mo

A site that works and rarely changes. Keep it safe, current and watched.

  • 1 hour of support work monthly
  • Canadian hosting, updates, daily backups
  • Uptime, SSL and malware monitoring
  • Monthly uptime summary and work log
  • Leave any time, full export provided
Start with Care
Care+
$275/mo

A site that's part of how you operate — events, forms, regular updates.

  • 3 hours of support work monthly
  • Everything in Care
  • Staging environment
  • Performance budget monitoring
  • Quarterly site health review
Start with Care+
Managed
$495/mo

You'd rather send an email than log in. We handle the site for you.

  • 6 hours of support work monthly
  • Everything in Care+
  • Content and page updates done for you
  • Priority same-day response
  • Annual strategy session
Start with Managed

Migration from your current host

Moved, tested and verified on staging before anything changes publicly. Includes a health check report you keep either way.

Freewith any plan

Extra support hours

When a month runs long. Quoted and approved before the work starts, never applied retroactively.

$135/hour

Visibility monitor

Add rank and AI-citation tracking to a hosting plan without a full SEO retainer. Reported alongside your uptime summary at $95/mo.

$95/mo
Straight answers

The questions people open with.

Including the one about why this costs more than nine dollars.

Ask me something else
Why does hosting cost more than $10 a month here?
Because this isn't only hosting. Budget hosting sells server space — updates, backups, monitoring, security and fixes remain your problem. These plans include the work of keeping the site running, plus support hours from someone who already knows how it's built. If you only want server space, buy server space — it's cheaper, and it's a legitimate choice for a site nobody depends on.
Are the servers actually in Canada?
Yes — Toronto (Vultr's Canadian data centre), managed from Edmonton. That matters if you handle donor or member data and have residency expectations written into a policy or funding agreement. We'll put the specifics in writing if your board needs them — that request comes up often enough that it's a normal part of onboarding, not a special favour.
Do you have to have built my site to host it?
No — we take on existing WordPress sites regularly, including ones other people built. There's a health check first, and you get the findings either way. Occasionally that check concludes the site needs work before hosting it anywhere makes sense, and we'll say so rather than quietly migrating a problem.
What counts as support, and what's billed separately?
Fixes, content updates, small changes and troubleshooting come out of your monthly hours. Anything project-sized — new templates, new functionality, a redesign — is quoted before it starts. If something is going to exceed your hours, you hear about it first. No retroactive invoices.
What happens if the site goes down?
Monitoring alerts us, usually before you notice. Then you get a named human who already knows your site — not a queue that asks you to describe the problem to someone seeing it for the first time. That difference is most of what you're paying for.
Can I leave?
Any time, 30 days notice, full export provided, and we'll help your next provider get set up. You own your site and your domain and we don't hold either hostage. A hosting relationship that survives on switching costs isn't worth having.
Next step

Let's check what
you've actually got.

Send me your URL and I'll run a health check before we talk — hosting, speed, plugin load, backup status, admin access. You get the findings whether or not you move, because a site running badly is worth knowing about either way.

Health check before any commitment Migration included, free No lock-in, ever
Send it over

Prototype form — not wired to a backend.