Website and email hosting services

Website and email hosting services

When your site is “up”, but bookings still stop

If your website goes down for a few hours in July, you don’t just lose traffic. You lose bookings, you miss enquiries, and you train people to not trust you. Same with email: if guests can’t reach you, they don’t wait, they move on. Most owners only notice hosting when something breaks, and by then you’re already paying for it.

This page is for small tourism businesses in Greece that need boring, stable website and email hosting, with someone watching the basics so you don’t get surprised. It’s not for owners who want to “play with servers”, change providers every season, or keep five different people with access because it feels safer. If that feels uncomfortable, we are not for you.

Who this is for, and who it is not for

You are a good fit if your business depends on direct enquiries and direct bookings, and you want your website and email to behave like utilities. You don’t need to become technical, you just need fewer unknowns. You want one place to call when email stops sending or the site starts throwing errors.

You are not a good fit if you want us to host a site while another agency keeps admin access and pushes changes whenever they want. That setup usually breaks at the worst time, and then everyone argues about whose fault it is. We also won’t take responsibility for “mystery hosting” where nobody can tell us what was changed, by whom, and when.

What this solves in real operations

Owners rarely say “I need hosting”. They say “the contact form stopped” or “we didn’t receive emails for a week” or “Google says the site is hacked” or “the website is slow on mobile”. The pattern is always the same: the business is running, guests are trying to reach you, and your online basics are quietly failing.

Good hosting isn’t about fancy features. It’s about removing the small, stupid failures that cost money and create stress. Downtime during high season means fewer enquiries, and fewer enquiries means you start compensating with more paid ads or more discounting. That is not a technical problem, it’s a business problem.

If you want a neutral definition of what “hosting” actually is, Wikipedia explains it plainly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_hosting_service. Email hosting has its own failure modes, and they are often more damaging because you don’t always notice right away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_hosting_service.

What changes after it’s in place

When hosting is set up correctly and maintained, you stop living with background anxiety. You stop checking your website randomly “just to be sure”. You stop wondering whether the last plugin update will crash the site and leave you blind for a weekend. You stop having that one person who “knows the email thing” and disappears when you need them.

Operationally, the change is simple: issues get detected earlier, recovery is faster, and access is controlled. You still might have problems, because the internet is not a stable place. The difference is you know what is happening, and you have a clear path to fix it.

What this does not solve

Hosting won’t fix a weak offer, bad photos, or a confusing booking process. It won’t turn a slow website into a fast one if the site is built heavy and messy, or if it’s loading huge images everywhere. It also won’t fix low visibility by itself, because being online is not the same as being found.

It also does not replace proper marketing decisions. If you run Google Ads to a broken page, you will still waste money, just faster. If you want to understand why “technical debt” keeps showing up in marketing costs, Ahrefs has a solid explanation of SEO basics that connects performance and visibility without the fluff: https://ahrefs.com/seo.

When this is a bad fit

This is a bad fit if you want support but you also want to keep everything informal. “My cousin has the domain”, “the old receptionist has the email password”, “the developer has the hosting login”, and nobody wants to touch it. That is exactly how businesses end up losing their domain or losing access to email during a dispute.

It’s also a bad fit if you need us to host and support a site that is constantly being modified by third-party plugins, cracked themes, or unknown scripts. We’ve seen this fail many times, and it fails in predictable ways: random redirects, spam pages, blacklisting, and then you’re stuck explaining to guests why your site looks unsafe.

What’s included (and what it means in practice)

• Reliable website hosting that matches the site’s real needs, not marketing promises.
• Email hosting that behaves like a business tool, with proper DNS and deliverability basics in place.
• Monitoring for uptime and obvious failures, so problems are seen early instead of discovered by a guest.
• Backups that are actually restorable, not just “a backup exists somewhere”.
• Renewal checks for domain and key services, because expiration is still one of the most expensive mistakes.
• Support when email stops working, the site throws errors, or access is lost.
• Basic security hygiene around logins and access, so you know who can do what.

Downtime isn’t just “a technical issue”

A down website means your direct channel is closed. In tourism, that doesn’t create a queue, it creates leakage. People don’t wait for your site to come back, they go to Booking or they message the next property. Even if you recover in an hour, the lost enquiries don’t come back and tell you they tried.

There is also the trust cost. Guests might try again later, but the first impression stays. If the browser shows warnings, or the site doesn’t load, you look careless even if your rooms are excellent. Google also notices instability over time, and while it’s not the only factor, it’s not helping.

If you want Google’s own plain guidance on keeping sites secure and accessible, start here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/website-security.

Email failure is usually worse than website failure

When the website is down, you notice. When email breaks, you often don’t. You keep sending, you keep working, and you assume the guest is slow to reply. Then you find out later that your mailbox was full, or your DNS was wrong, or your email got flagged, and you missed a week of enquiries.

A common story: owner changes phones, the email app stops syncing, and nobody checks the webmail. Another story: the old agency set up email on a server tied to the domain, then the domain expires, and everything collapses in one afternoon. These things sound basic, but they happen every season.

For a practical explanation of why email deliverability fails and how authentication affects it, Google’s overview of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is worth reading, even if you don’t want to touch the settings yourself: https://support.google.com/a/answer/33786.

Common mistakes we keep walking into

Most hosting problems are not “bad luck”. They are predictable outcomes of messy ownership and neglected maintenance. The frustrating part is that the business often paid for the setup once, then assumed it stays correct forever. It doesn’t.

Domain not renewed, or renewed by the wrong person

This is the classic. The domain is registered under a personal email that nobody checks, or the billing card expired, or the reminder goes to an ex-employee. The site goes down, email goes down, and you spend days proving you own your own name. It feels unreal when it happens, but it keeps happening.

Email tied to a person who left

You’d be surprised how many businesses have “info@” forwarding to a personal Gmail, or the only admin account is “maria@” and Maria left two summers ago. Then you need a password reset, and the reset goes to Maria. Now you’re negotiating access like it’s a hostage situation.

No backups, or backups that can’t be restored

Some hosts advertise backups, but they are not always usable the way you assume. Sometimes it’s only partial, sometimes it overwrites, sometimes the restore is manual and slow, sometimes it restores a broken state. Owners only learn this after an update or a hack, when they need it most.

Old plugins, old themes, and “it still works”

WordPress sites, especially, tend to run on habits. Someone updates nothing because they’re afraid to break it, then a vulnerability gets exploited, and the site starts sending spam or redirecting to casino pages. Then you get blacklisted and your email deliverability suffers too, because everything is connected through the domain reputation.

If you want a neutral reference on how plugin vulnerabilities get abused, Wordfence publishes clear incident-style explanations: https://www.wordfence.com/blog/.

Support that is boring on purpose

Support should feel predictable. You should know what happens when something goes wrong, and what we need from you to fix it. When support is vague, owners start doing risky things like changing DNS at midnight or deleting accounts because someone on a forum suggested it.

When you contact us for a hosting or email issue, we aim to establish three facts quickly: what changed, what is failing, and what access is available. Then we either fix it, or we tell you what is blocking the fix, in plain language. If the problem is outside the hosting, we say so and we stop there.

Boundaries that keep this stable

Stable hosting requires controlled change. That means fewer people with admin access, fewer “quick fixes”, and clear ownership of the domain and DNS. If you want stability but you also want everyone to have full access, those goals conflict.

We also don’t run hosting as a place where random experiments happen. If you need staging environments, constant new plugins, or weekly redesign changes, that’s a different operational model. It can be done, but it’s not the same as “keep my bookings channel dependable”.

What you should expect from us, and what we expect from you

From us, you should expect clear communication, documentation of what matters, and a calm response when things break. You should not expect miracles, or “we’ll just hack it back online” without understanding the cause. That approach creates repeat failures, and owners pay for the same problem again and again.

From you, we need cooperation on access and decision-making. When we ask “who owns the domain”, we need a real answer, not “I think it’s the old developer”. When we ask for an email accounts list, we need the list, not “we have a few”. These details are boring, but they are the difference between a 20-minute fix and a three-day mess.

Real-world failure patterns (and why they keep repeating)

One year it’s the domain. Next year it’s the mailbox. Then it’s the SSL certificate. The failures rotate, but the root cause is the same: nobody is responsible for the boring parts. In small tourism businesses, responsibility often sits in the gaps between roles. The owner assumes “the web guy” handles it, and the web guy assumes the owner handles payments and renewals.

Another pattern: the site is hosted in one place, email in another, DNS in a third, and nobody has a map. That can be okay if it’s documented, but usually it’s not. Then one small change breaks three systems at once, and you can’t even tell where the break is.

If you want a clean explanation of DNS and why one wrong record can take you offline, Cloudflare’s learning center is one of the few sources that stays readable:

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How to decide if you should contact us

If your business depends on direct enquiries, and you don’t have the time or appetite to manage hosting details, you should talk to us. If you have had even one incident where the website or email was down and you didn’t know who to call, you should talk to us. If you are planning changes like a new website, a new domain, or new email accounts, it’s better to get the ownership and hosting foundation clean first, otherwise you’ll carry old problems into the new setup.

If you’re mainly on OTAs and you treat your website as a brochure, you might not need this level of attention. That is not a judgment, it’s just economics. But most owners who say “we’re fine with OTAs” still get angry when they realise they lost direct bookings because email was broken for ten days and nobody noticed.

What we need from you before we touch anything

To keep this stable and avoid accidental damage, we start by asking for a small set of facts. It saves time, reduces back-and-forth, and avoids the common situation where three different people send three different passwords.

Please send:

1. Your current hosting provider (name and, if possible, the control panel you use).
2. Your domain provider and who has access to the registrar account.
3. A list of email accounts in use (addresses, who uses them, and which ones are critical like info@ and reservations@).

If you don’t have all of this, that’s normal. Just tell us what you do know, and what you suspect. The fastest way to lose a week is to pretend the details don’t matter, because then we spend days discovering them the hard way.

Decision, framed in business terms

This is not about having the “best” hosting. It’s about protecting your direct sales channel from avoidable failures, and making sure your business can receive and answer enquiries every day you are open. If your website and email are part of how you make money, they need to be treated like operational infrastructure, not like a one-time purchase.

If you want us to look at your current setup and tell you whether it’s stable or fragile, contact us with the three items above. We’ll tell you what we’d change, what we’d leave alone, and where this usually breaks in businesses like yours, so you can decide calmly.

Not sure where to start? Contact our local team for friendly, personalised advice and to arrange a meeting in person.

No shortcuts. No noise. Data analysis. Use only what works.