We manage hosting for a growing number of clients across Linux, WordPress and dedicated hosting plans. 2024 gave us plenty of opportunities to refine our approach — here's what we learned. **Proactive monitoring pays dividends.** The clients who had the smoothest year were the ones on our managed hosting plans where we actively monitor uptime, performance and security. Catching a problem before your client does is always better than firefighting. **Email deliverability is still a mess.** With increasingly strict spam filters from Google and Microsoft, getting email to land in inboxes has become an art form. We spent more time in 2024 setting up proper SPF, DKIM and DMARC records than ever before — and it's absolutely worth doing right from day one. **Cheap hosting is a false economy.** Several clients came to us mid-year having experienced downtime, slow load times and poor support from bargain hosting providers. The cost of migrating them, fixing their sites and rebuilding their confidence in their digital presence far exceeded the modest saving they'd made. **Backups should be boring.** The best backup systems are the ones you never think about — until you need them. We revamped our backup schedules and tested our restoration procedures more rigorously than ever in 2024. Sleep better knowing you can restore a site in minutes, not hours. Looking to move your hosting to a provider that actually cares? [We'd love to talk](/contact).

Web Hosting Lessons Learned in 2024