By Bianca Frank, Creative Director · Bianca Frank Design, Anchorage
Originally published June 2024. Fully rewritten and updated October 2026.
Most business owners find out what web hosting is the day it fails. The site is down, or it’s showing a warning, or a form has quietly stopped sending for three months and nobody noticed until a customer called to ask why no one replied. Then there’s a scramble to figure out where the site even lives, who has the password, and whether anyone has a backup.
This post is the explanation I wish every client had before that day. What hosting is, what “managed” adds, what goes wrong when nobody is managing, what it costs with us, and how switching works if you’re somewhere you shouldn’t be.
In short:
- Hosting is the server your website lives on. Management is the work of keeping the site updated, backed up, secure and working. Most cheap hosting includes none of the second part.
- Unmanaged sites fail in predictable ways: a plugin update breaks a page, a form stops sending, a hack gets in through an old theme, a domain expires, a backup turns out not to exist.
- Our plans are $125 a month for a standard business site and $325 for a corporate site with multiple stakeholders, both including hosting, updates, backups, security, monitoring, a security certificate and an hour of content changes each month.
- Switching hosts is a few hours of careful work, not a rebuild. We’ve moved dozens of WordPress sites with no downtime.
- The one thing to insist on anywhere: the domain and hosting account are in your name.
Hosting and management are two different things
Hosting is the computer your website’s files sit on, connected to the internet, so that when someone types your address the site appears. It’s a utility. The cheapest version is a few dollars a month from a national provider, and for a site nobody touches it mostly works.
Management is everything that keeps a modern website working after launch. A WordPress site has a core system, a theme and typically ten to twenty plugins, and each of them releases updates, some of them security fixes, several times a year. Each update can conflict with another. Forms need testing. Backups need to exist and need to be restorable. Someone has to notice when the site goes down, and someone has to answer when the owner says “the booking button isn’t working.”
Cheap hosting gives you the server. It does not give you the person. That gap is where almost every website problem we’re called about comes from.
The five things that go wrong when nobody is managing
These are not hypotheticals; they’re the calls.
- The update that breaks the page. WordPress or a plugin updates automatically, something conflicts, and the home page is blank or the layout is scrambled. On a managed site, updates are run on a schedule, checked afterward, and rolled back if something breaks. On an unmanaged one, the owner finds out from a customer.
- The form that stops sending. Email delivery from websites breaks constantly: a mail setting changes, a provider tightens a rule, a plugin updates. The form still says “thank you” and the message goes nowhere. We test forms as part of management because this one is silent and expensive.
- The hack through the old theme. A theme or plugin that hasn’t been updated in two years is a known door. The site starts redirecting visitors to pharmacy ads, or Google flags it as dangerous, and the owner’s reputation takes the hit. Updates and monitoring close the door; a backup is how you recover if someone got through first.
- The expired domain. The renewal notice went to an old email, the card on file expired, and the business’s name is now for sale. If the domain is in the developer’s name rather than yours, it’s worse. We manage domains and DNS in-house for clients so the renewal is never a surprise and the name is always theirs.
- The backup that doesn’t exist. Many hosts say “backups included” and mean a copy they take occasionally that nobody has ever tried to restore. A real backup is automatic, recent, stored away from the site, and tested. We’ve written separately about how backups and recovery should work.
What our management plans include
Two plans, both built around the same idea: you shouldn’t have to think about any of the above.
| Standard | Corporate | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $125 | $325 |
| Built for | A small business with one point of contact | An organization with several stakeholders and approvals |
| Hosting and support | Yes | Yes |
| WordPress, plugin and theme updates, with monthly audit | Yes | Yes |
| Automated backups | Yes | Yes |
| Security monitoring and a security certificate (SSL) | Yes | Yes |
| Uptime and downtime monitoring | Yes | Yes |
| Link checking and form testing | Yes | Yes |
| Performance tracking and reporting | Yes | Yes |
| Domain and DNS managed in-house | Yes | Yes |
| Emergency support for broken pages and plugin conflicts | Yes | Yes |
| Content updates included | 1 hour per month | 1 hour per month |
| PCI compliance for e-commerce | +$50/month | +$50/month |
Support runs Monday to Friday, 9 to 3, with Saturday on call. The included hour covers the small things that otherwise never get done: new hours, a staff change, a price, a photo swap. It expires monthly, which is a nudge to use it.
What isn’t in the plan: redesigns, new pages, new features. Those are projects, quoted separately, and clients on a plan get them done faster because we already know the site.
Switching hosts, without the drama
People stay on bad hosting for years because they assume moving means rebuilding. It doesn’t. A WordPress migration is a sequence: back up the current site, move the files and database, set the site up on the new server, install the security certificate, test everything, then change the DNS so the address points to the new home. Done properly, visitors never see a gap and nothing breaks, including the search rankings, because the addresses don’t change.
We’ve migrated dozens of WordPress sites this way, from e-commerce stores to portfolios to small business sites, and the process is the same each time. The one thing we need from you is access to the current host and the domain registrar. If you don’t know where those are, that’s the first thing we find out, and it’s often the most useful part of the whole exercise.
Who should be on a managed plan, and who shouldn’t
If the site matters to your revenue, if it has forms people depend on, if nobody on your staff knows WordPress, or if you’ve already had one of the five failures above, a managed plan costs less than the next failure. That describes most of the Alaska businesses and organizations we work with.
If the site is a one-page placeholder you’ll never touch, cheap hosting and an annual check-in is fine. We’d say so. And if you have a competent in-house person who enjoys this work, management may be redundant; hosting alone is enough.
The one rule, wherever you host
The domain and the hosting account are in your business’s name, with your email on the renewals, and you have the logins. The agency or developer can be a user on the account; they should never be the owner. We set every client up that way, and when we take over a site from somewhere else, fixing this is usually step one. A website you don’t own isn’t an asset; it’s a liability with a monthly fee.
Frequently asked questions
What’s the difference between web hosting and website management? Hosting is the server the site lives on. Management is keeping the site updated, backed up, secure, monitored and working, with a person to call. Cheap hosting includes the server only.
How much does web hosting cost in Alaska? Bare hosting from a national provider runs a few dollars a month. Managed hosting with updates, backups, security, monitoring and support runs $125 a month for a standard business site with us, $325 for a corporate site with multiple stakeholders.
Can I move my WordPress site to a new host without losing anything? Yes. A proper migration copies the files and database, sets up the new server and certificate, tests the site, and then switches the address. Visitors see no gap and the addresses don’t change, so search rankings aren’t affected.
How often should a WordPress site be updated? Core, theme and plugin updates arrive several times a month. A managed site applies them on a schedule, usually monthly with security fixes sooner, and checks the site afterward.
Who should own the domain and hosting account? Your business, always, with the renewals going to an email you check. A developer or agency can be added as a user. If they own it, get that changed before anything else.
Find out where your site lives
If you’re not sure who hosts your site, who owns the domain, or whether a backup exists, that’s the state most businesses are in before they call us. Send us your website address and we’ll tell you where it lives, what shape it’s in, and whether a management plan or a simple migration makes sense.
Bianca Frank is the founder and Creative Director of Bianca Frank Design, an Anchorage agency that has designed brands and websites for Alaska businesses since 2007. She holds a BFA in Graphic Design and leads a small in-house team covering branding, web design, SEO and content strategy, with recent work for clients including Nalaquq LLC, the Native Village of Barrow, Solstice Psychiatry and Alaska Geographic. BFD was named one of Anchorage’s best web designers by Three Best Rated (2025) and received UpCity’s Local Excellence and Best of Alaska awards (2022, 2023)
