Hosting and email finally set up properly

The situation

Cheap shared hosting exists in a market where every euro counts, but the price sits in what you don't get: redundancy, monitoring, uptime guarantees, decent email deliverability. For a personal blog it's fine. For a business that receives client requests by email and sends out invoices, it's a time bomb.

The damage shows up in two places management often doesn't see directly: the site is occasionally unreachable during business hours (and nobody calls you to say "your site is down"), and business email lands in recipients' spam because SPF/DKIM/DMARC aren't configured, or are configured wrong.

What we did

A focused mini-migration in ten working days:

Days 1-2: inventory of what was running (website stack, email addresses, distribution lists, CMS content), choice of the new stack. For this client: Vercel for the website, Microsoft 365 Business for mail. Fits the scale and stays affordable.

Days 3-7: build out the new environment in parallel without touching the old. Prepare DNS records, configure SPF/DKIM/DMARC correctly, provision mailboxes, migrate content, set up hosting with automatic backups.

Day 8: cutover evening. DNS switched in a planned slot, mail flow tested with a series of test messages to Gmail/Outlook/iCloud recipients, monitoring on.

Days 9-10: aftercare, small tunes (a few senders still pointing at the old server), old vendor cancelled, runbook handed over.

What it delivered

Post-migration:

- No unplanned downtime in the 12 months that followed (measured via uptime monitoring). - Google deliverability report: from "many complaints" to green across the board. - Monthly hosting + mail cost rose from 9 to 32 euro per month. For 23 euro extra per month, infrastructure they never have to fix in their spare time again. - One place for support: our helpdesk channel instead of an online form at the old vendor where answers took 48 hours.

What this wasn't

Not "you need a corporate cloud platform". Not a multi-year license deal. Not a full website rebuild in the same breath; the existing site just moved with us. What it was: hosting and email that work the way a business expects, with a price tag that fits fifteen employees.