Competition websites do not behave like normal websites. Live draws, ticket launches, and countdown deadlines create sudden, intense traffic spikes that standard hosting cannot handle. Our hosting is purpose-built for exactly this.
Based on our experience hosting 50+ UK competition websites these are the operational realities that standard hosting providers do not account for.
When a draw goes live or a high-value competition launches, traffic surges within minutes not hours. Shared hosting throttles or crashes under this load. Every failed page load is a lost entry and lost revenue.
Slow hosting does not just lose visitors it breaks payment flows. If your checkout takes more than a few seconds to respond, Apple Pay and Google Pay sessions time out, transactions fail, and your payment provider flags your account.
Ticket counters, progress bars, countdown timers, and instant win results must update in real time. Aggressive caching on standard hosting serves stale data showing tickets as available when they are sold, or countdowns that do not match reality.
Payment providers and Meta's RMG review both require your site to be served over HTTPS with a valid SSL certificate. Downtime, mixed content warnings, or expired certificates can trigger payment freezes and ad account suspensions.
Every hosting environment we deploy is configured specifically for competition website traffic patterns and operational requirements.
Server resources configured to absorb sudden traffic surges during draws and launches no manual scaling, no downtime, no throttling.
Custom caching rules that serve static content fast while keeping ticket counts, progress bars, countdowns, and instant win results live and accurate.
Static assets served from the nearest edge location to every visitor. Pages load fast regardless of where your players are UK-wide and internationally.
SSL certificates provisioned, configured, and renewed automatically. Your site is served over HTTPS at all times required for payments and Meta RMG.
Daily automated backups with one-click restore. Your site, database, and competition data are protected against data loss, corruption, or accidental changes.
On our Priority package, we manage WordPress core updates, plugin updates, and security patches tested in staging before deployment so nothing breaks on your live site.
A direct comparison of what standard hosting delivers versus what competition websites actually need.
Real hosting failures from competition websites we have been asked to fix, migrate, or rebuild and what caused them.
Three plans built on the same competition-optimised infrastructure. Every plan includes free migration, SSL, CDN, and competition-aware caching as standard.
50+
Competition websites hosted
99.9%
Average uptime maintained
0.4s
Average page load time
5★
Google rating
Common questions about hosting for UK competition websites, answered by our infrastructure team.
Standard shared hosting places your site on a server with hundreds of other websites, all competing for the same resources. When you launch a competition or run a live draw, traffic can spike by 10 to 50 times within minutes. Shared hosting cannot absorb these spikes. Your site slows down, payment processing fails, and entries are lost. We have seen competition operators lose thousands of pounds in revenue from a single draw-night outage on shared hosting.
Performance (£99/month) is the right starting point for most competition operators. It includes managed WordPress on competition-optimised servers, Cloudflare CDN, SSL, daily backups, DDoS protection, and competition-aware caching. Priority (£149/month) adds managed plugin updates with auto-rollback, a full staging environment, malware scanning, and priority incident response. Pro (£199/month) is for high-volume operators who need global edge security, proactive 60-second monitoring, 90-day backup retention, a dedicated account manager, and custom server configuration.
Server resources are configured to absorb sudden traffic surges during draws and competition launches. Your site stays fast, checkout stays responsive, and payment processing continues uninterrupted. We configure caching, CDN, and server resources specifically for the traffic patterns competition websites experience: short, intense spikes rather than gradual growth.
SSL is included as standard across all three plans. We configure, manage, and auto-renew your SSL certificate as part of the setup, ensuring your site is served over HTTPS at all times. This is a requirement for payment processing, GDPR compliance, and Meta RMG advertising approval.
The Performance plan includes WordPress core and PHP auto-updates. The Priority plan adds managed plugin updates that are regression-tested with automatic rollback if anything breaks, plus a full staging environment to test changes before deployment. The Pro plan includes all of this alongside a dedicated account manager and custom server configuration.
Yes. We handle the full migration including DNS transfer, file migration, database migration, SSL configuration, and post-migration testing. There is no downtime during the switchover. We have migrated competition websites from shared hosting, VPS providers, and other managed hosting platforms. Free migration is included with all plans.
All plans target 99.9% uptime and include server monitoring. The Pro plan adds proactive monitoring with 60-second check intervals, giving us faster detection and response to any performance degradation. In practice, our hosting infrastructure has maintained above 99.9% uptime across all competition websites we manage.
Managed WordPress hosts are excellent general-purpose platforms, but they are not configured for the traffic patterns and operational requirements of competition websites. They do not account for draw-night traffic spikes, payment provider uptime requirements, or the server-side automation that powers the Nera Competition Engine. Our hosting is purpose-configured for how competition websites actually operate, including caching rules that do not interfere with real-time ticket availability, progress bars, and countdown timers.
No. All plans are billed monthly with no long-term contract. You can change or cancel your plan at any time. Hosting can be added to any Nera competition website build or as a standalone service for an existing competition site.
