What 'managed hosting' actually includes (and what it doesn't)

Every host describes itself as “managed” now. The bar has got so low that it sometimes just means “we turn the server on for you”. So when someone asks what we actually do, fair question, here’s the honest answer.

What Cam Cloud manages for you

On every plan, we:

• Run the server itself. OS patches, PHP versions, security updates, log rotation, all of that. You never SSH anywhere.
• Back your site up. Daily or weekly depending on your plan, off-site, and retained long enough that you can roll back after even a slow-burn problem.
• Test the backups. A backup you’ve never restored is a rumour, not a backup. We restore sites into sandboxes regularly to confirm they actually work.
• Monitor uptime and SSL. If your site goes down, we usually know before you do.
• Cloudflare and WAF. SSL, DDoS protection, bot filtering. Set up and kept current.
• Migrations. We move your site from the old host to us. For free. On every plan.
• Free SSL renewal, forever. Via Cloudflare or Let’s Encrypt, automatic.

That’s the baseline. It’s what we consider the bare minimum you should expect from anything calling itself “managed”.

What requires a maintenance plan

Some things aren’t really “hosting” work, they’re site work. Those sit under our Care plans:

• WordPress core, plugin and theme updates (including the hand-holding when something breaks)
• Staging, testing and deploying those updates properly
• Log review, someone actually reading the errors, not just archiving them
• Quarterly health-check reports with real findings
• Contact-form testing so you know the enquiry form still works

You can have our hosting without a care plan. Plenty of people do, especially if they’ve got an in-house developer or a freelancer who handles WordPress already. But if you don’t, we’d gently suggest a care plan, because a site that nobody is maintaining eventually becomes a site that nobody is running.

What’s not included (and never will be)

We try to be honest about the limits. Things we don’t do:

• Unlimited custom development. One-off dev work is billable; we quote up-front.
• SEO consulting. We care about it (site speed, Core Web Vitals, structured data, proper meta tags), but SEO strategy is its own job.
• Content writing. We’re engineers, not copywriters.
• Email hosting. We route mail via reputable SMTP providers; your mailboxes live with Google/Microsoft/Fastmail.

We’d rather be brilliant at the hosting-and-maintenance bit than mediocre at ten things.

The two-sentence summary

Hosting keeps the site running. Maintenance keeps the site working. You can take one or both, we just want you to know what you’re getting.