🤝
Reliable hosting for your business since 2012.
For the client
Your web developer recommends fortrabbit. Here is what that means for your business.
Built what
Built how
This page exists for a specific moment: a web developer or agency has recommended fortrabbit for a website, and the person who owns that website — a business owner, not a developer — wants to know what they are agreeing to. Or a finished project is about to change hands, and its owner is about to receive the hosting along with it. No technical knowledge is required here. We are the hosting company: we run the computers the website lives on and keep them working, and have done so since 2012. The developer builds and maintains the website itself. This page explains where the line between those two jobs runs, and what it means for the business.
What the money pays for
Hosting is the service that keeps a website reachable on the internet: space on servers, the technology that runs the site, and people watching over both around the clock. The monthly amount is made of parts the developer picks to fit the website — computing power, a database, file storage, and so on. A small website books small parts and costs accordingly; the smallest possible setup starts at €2.50 per month. Current numbers and examples live on the pricing page.
Two properties of the billing matter more than the amounts. First, it is post-paid: the invoice arrives after a month of service and covers what was actually used, counted by the day — never a year in advance. Second, the price does not drift on its own: the developer either books a fixed plan, in which case the amount is fixed and a warning email goes out before a limit is reached, or allows automatic scaling up to an agreed cap, in which case a busy month can cost more than a quiet one — within that cap, itemized on the invoice.
Who owns what
On the hosting side, ownership follows the money. Every hosted website belongs to a payment method — a billing profile with a name, an invoice address, and a card or bank account behind it. Whoever controls that billing profile owns the hosting: the invoices carry their name, they decide who may work on the site, and they can cancel. The developer's ability to work on the website is a separate matter entirely — access is granted to a person, for a specific website, and can be given or taken away at any time without the website noticing.
That separation makes two clean arrangements possible. Either the developer owns the hosting, pays us, and puts hosting on their own invoice to the client — the business owner then never needs to see any of this. Or the business owns the hosting through its own billing profile, pays us directly, and grants the developer the access needed for maintenance. Both are common, neither is better, and switching from one to the other later is a short administrative act — the website itself does not move and stays online throughout.
If the developer moves on
Developers retire, change careers, get too busy, or the relationship ends badly. What matters then is who owns the hosting. When the business owns it, the answer is short: the old developer's access is switched off, a new developer's access is switched on, and the website keeps running untouched — there is nothing to hand back and nothing the old developer can withhold. When the developer owns it, ownership is transferred first — the handover described above — and because billing is counted by the day, even a mid-month transfer means nobody pays twice for the same period.
One honest limit: we can transfer the hosting cleanly, but not the knowledge in the departing developer's head. A new developer still has to get to know the website itself. That goes better when the question of ownership is settled before it becomes urgent.
Day to day
Owning the hosting does not create a daily duty. The owner login is administrative: see and download invoices, update the card on file, change who has access. Checking it when an invoice raises a question is a normal amount of use. The technical work — updates, changes, fixes — remains the developer's, and none of it requires the owner's involvement. The one real obligation is keeping the email address on the account current, because that is where invoices and any billing problems arrive.
When the site is down
The 9 am question: the website is not loading — who gets the call? The developer, first. Most downtime we see is caused by something in the website itself — a change, an update, an exhausted resource — which is exactly the part the developer knows and we deliberately stay out of. Whether the problem is on our side instead can be checked without any login on the public status page.
Our support covers the hosting service and billing, not the inner workings of the website. It runs as a chat during business hours (CET); the median first response is under two hours, and there is no phone line. The platform itself is monitored around the clock on our side, backed by a 99.5% uptime commitment. For a technical incident, the most effective setup is the developer talking to our support directly — we can rarely help a worried owner through a conversation that has to be technical, and we say so openly in our guidance for exactly this situation.
Stopping, on purpose or by accident
Cancellation happens in the dashboard, takes effect immediately, and costs nothing extra: the final invoice covers the days used, and no contract term or notice period stands in the way. Nothing about the arrangement continues out of inertia.
A missed payment is handled with patience. A failed charge triggers an email and automatic retries over the following weeks; websites are only deleted after several unpaid invoices with no response, and a human reviews each case before that happens. Deleted websites cannot be recovered, so the one thing that protects a business here is reading and answering those emails. The full policy is public in the late payments article.
And none of this is a trap. Websites here are built on standard, open technology, so a developer can take a complete copy of the site and its data at any time and set it up with another provider. We would rather be chosen than needed.
Who is behind this
A business that depends on its website is also making a bet on the hosting company still existing in ten years. This service has been operated by the same small, independent company from Berlin since 2012 — no investors to satisfy, no acquisition story, and we publish how the money is spent. Being a small business ourselves, we take particular care of the many business websites hosted here.
Small businesses are the 💜 of the economy.
Questions before agreeing to anything are welcome — from the business owner or from the developer on their behalf.