For years, “hosting” has meant one thing: your site is up, and you’re paying for the privilege. That’s it. Once a year you log in to renew, squint at a dashboard you don’t understand, and get on with your life.
I always thought that was a bit rubbish.
You’ve got a website. You presumably want it to do something: get found, get visited, stay online. So why does the relationship with your host usually stop at “yep, still running”? Knowing your site is up tells you about as much as knowing your car has petrol in it. Useful, sure. But it doesn’t tell you whether you’re actually going anywhere.
So we fixed it.
Every hosting account now comes with performance reports
From now on, every site we host comes with a regular performance report. No upsell, no add-on, no “premium tier” nonsense. If we host you, you get it.
Here’s what’s in it:
Analytics: actual visitor numbers. How many people came, where they came from, what they looked at. The stuff you’d want to know but probably never got around to setting up properly (or set up once in 2019 and never looked at again).
Search Console data: how you’re showing up in Google. What you’re ranking for, what’s getting clicks, and where there’s room to grow. This is the bit most people don’t realise they have access to, let alone read.
Uptime figures: yes, we’ll still tell you the site’s up. But now you’ll have the numbers to prove it, rather than just my word for it.
All of it lands in your inbox on a schedule, in plain English, without you having to log into anything or learn what a “bounce rate” is to make sense of it.
A screenshot of the email report.
How we pulled this off
Full disclosure: this isn’t me suddenly becoming generous out of nowhere and manually pulling reports together each month. It’s because we built the thing that makes it possible.
SendTidings started life as a side project; a tool for turning scattered analytics, Search Console and uptime data into clean, readable reports that actually get sent to people. The kind of thing agencies say they’ll do for clients and then quietly never do because it’s a faff to set up every month.
Turns out the best way to test your own product is to use it on your own clients. So that’s exactly what we’re doing. SendTidings now powers the reports going out across our hosting accounts, which means you get the benefit of a proper reporting tool baked into your hosting — and I get to actually use my own software. Everybody wins.
You don’t have to do anything
That’s the best part. There’s no form to fill in, no setting to toggle, no “opt in to receive your reports.” It’s just on now.
If you host with us, keep an eye on your inbox. Your first report will turn up on the 1st of Julu. And if there’s anything in it you want to dig into – or anything you’d rather see more or less of – you know where to find me.
Most hosts will happily take your money and let your site sit there in silence. We’d rather actually tell you how it’s doing.
Josh Cox
I'm Josh — I build, host and look after WordPress sites (and increasingly fast Astro / Next.js builds) for Oxfordshire businesses, from Didcot, since 2016. I also tinker with a few products of my own on the side.
