hosting

Good hosting is boring.
If you're thinking about it, something's already wrong.

Managed hosting should be invisible. Your site loads fast, stays up, and you never once have to think about server configurations, SSL renewals, or what happens if something breaks at 11pm on a Tuesday. That's the whole point. Most small business owners don't have that. They've got a $5/month plan from a shared host, a site that loads like it's apologizing, and a vague dread that something is qui

{ Cleaning } { HVAC }

the honest truth

Cheap hosting isn't cheap. You pay for it in ways that don't show up on your invoice.

Here's something the $5/month hosting companies don't advertise: Google measures how fast your site loads, and they use it as a ranking signal. A slow site doesn't just frustrate visitors — it actively hurts where you show up in search results. If your site takes four seconds to load, a chunk of your potential customers have already hit the back button before they've seen a single word you've written. Research consistently puts that bounce rate threshold at two to three seconds. After that, you're bleeding leads.

Shared hosting is the main culprit. When you're on a shared server, you're living in a digital apartment building — and you don't get to pick your neighbors. If the website two doors down gets a traffic spike, runs a bloated plugin, or gets hit with a malware attack, your site slows down with it. You didn't do anything wrong. You just got unlucky with the neighbor. That's the shared hosting deal, and most people don't find out until it's already cost them.

The false economy of cheap hosting only works if your website doesn't matter to your business. For a lot of small businesses — a cleaning company that books exclusively through their contact form, a coach whose course sales happen on their site, an HVAC company whose after-hours leads come through the web — the website is the business. Saving $30/month on hosting and losing even one $800 job because your site was down or too slow to trust is not a good trade. We've seen it happen more times than we can count.

what you actually get

Managed hosting that handles itself — and gets out of your way.

"Managed hosting" gets thrown around a lot. In practice it usually means you're on a slightly nicer shared server with a fancier dashboard. What we mean by it is different: your entire stack is configured, maintained, and watched by us — so you never have to think about it.

{ the stack }

WordPress hosting on a hardened server — in plain English

We run your site on a dedicated environment configured specifically for WordPress. That means your server isn't also running somebody's e-commerce platform or their Joomla blog from 2014. The PHP version is current. The database is tuned for WordPress. The web server is configured to handle the way WordPress actually works.

In plain language: your site runs on a setup that's designed for exactly what you're doing, not a generic box that's tolerating it. That matters for speed. It matters for security. And it means when we troubleshoot something, we actually know what we're looking at.

{ backups }

Nightly backups with 30-day retention — and a one-click restore if it all goes sideways

Every night, your entire site gets backed up. Files, database, everything. We keep 30 days of those backups on hand. If something goes wrong — a bad plugin update, an accidental deletion, someone gets into your site — we can roll your site back to a clean version, usually within the hour.

Most cheap hosting plans technically offer backups. Read the fine print and you'll find they keep three days, charge you extra to actually restore, or run the backup from the same server the site lives on (which means if the server dies, the backup dies too). Our backups are stored separately. They're tested. And restoring from one doesn't require submitting a support ticket and waiting two days.

{ speed }

SSL, CDN, and caching — the three things that actually make a site fast

SSL is the padlock in your browser bar. It's not optional anymore — Google flags sites without it, and visitors see a "Not Secure" warning that kills trust immediately. We include SSL with every hosting plan, and it auto-renews so you never end up with an expired certificate and a broken site.

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) stores copies of your site's static files — images, scripts, stylesheets — on servers around the country. When someone in Mason or Covington loads your site, they're pulling files from a nearby server, not racing across the country. Faster for them. Better for your rankings.

Server-level caching means your site isn't rebuilding every single page from scratch every time someone visits. WordPress, by default, does a lot of database work to serve a page. Caching serves a pre-built version instead. It's one of the highest-impact speed improvements you can make, and it's baked into every plan we offer.

{ security }

Security monitoring and malware scanning — actually watched, not just claimed

A lot of hosts say they "monitor" your site. What that often means is an automated flag fires if your site goes completely offline. That's not monitoring. That's an obituary.

We run ongoing malware scanning that checks your files for known malicious code, suspicious injections, and unauthorized changes. We monitor for unusual login activity and brute-force attempts. If something looks wrong, we get an alert — not you. You find out after we've handled it, not by discovering your site has been redirecting visitors to a pharma scam since last Thursday.

WordPress sites are targeted constantly. Bots are always probing for outdated plugins, weak passwords, known vulnerabilities. The question isn't whether someone will try to get in — it's whether your host is paying attention when they do.

the numbers

99.95% uptime. Here's what that means for your business.

At 99.95% uptime, your site is down for about 4.4 hours per year. That sounds acceptable until you realize downtime doesn't schedule itself for 3am on a Sunday. It happens during business hours, during a Google Ads campaign, during the week you just got mentioned in a local blog and traffic is spiking. At the other end of the spectrum — the 99% uptime that some budget hosts quietly promise — you're looking at 87 hours of downtime per year. More than three and a half days. That's not a number any business should be comfortable with. Speed matters in the same way. A one-second delay in page load time has been shown to reduce conversions by as much as 7%. For a service business generating $5,000/month through their website, that's $350 in lost revenue — every month — from one second of slowness. These aren't abstract numbers. They're what happens when you let hosting be an afterthought. We don't just set these targets and walk away. We monitor load time continuously and get alerted if your site starts responding slowly, not just if it goes down completely. By the time a performance issue would affect your visitors, we're usually already on it.

what's in the box

One plan. Everything your site needs to run properly — included.

We don't sell you a base hosting plan and then charge you separately for backups, SSL, a CDN add-on, a security plugin subscription, and a staging site upgrade. That's how the industry works. It's not how we work. Here's what comes with every Red Cedar hosting plan:

  • Managed WordPress hosting — dedicated environment, tuned for WordPress, current PHP, maintained by us
  • SSL certificate (auto-renewing) — the padlock, set up and renewed automatically, no action needed from you
  • Malware scanning — ongoing file scanning for malicious code and unauthorized changes
  • Uptime monitoring with alerts — we get notified if your site goes down, before you do
  • Monthly performance report — load times, uptime summary, and anything we addressed that month