Archive hosting for records that outlive the website.
An archive is judged on whether a citation still works a decade later. That is a hosting promise more than an editorial one.
Depth, not traffic.
Archives are quiet sites with enormous datasets, which is the opposite of what most hosting advice assumes.
Millions of records that stay queryable
A parish register or a photograph collection is hundreds of thousands of items with structured fields. Those are indexed for the fields researchers filter on rather than treated as ordinary posts.
Page four thousand of the results
Researchers go deep into result sets in a way ordinary visitors never do. Deep pagination is handled with cursors instead of offsets, which is why page four thousand does not time out.
Scans served at reading resolution
Archive images are enormous because they have to be. Derivatives are generated on ingest so a researcher can browse thumbnails and still zoom into the original.
Citations that keep working
A record URL appears in published research and stays there. Permanent URLs and redirect history are treated as part of the archive rather than as site configuration.
Preservation is the point
The collection is often the only digital copy. Backups are the product here, not an insurance policy attached to it.
A quiet site with a huge database.
Archives get modest visitor numbers and hold more rows than most ecommerce stores. Sizing on traffic alone gets this exactly backwards.
- Records indexed on the fields researchers use
- Deep pagination implemented with cursors
- Derivatives generated on ingest
- Permanent URLs preserved with redirect history
Result page four thousand.
Nobody tests this and researchers do it daily. Offset pagination degrades linearly with depth, which is why archives feel fine until somebody actually uses them.
What we change for archives
The defining constraint is a dataset far larger than the traffic, and a promise that URLs outlive the site's redesigns.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Record indexing | Indexed on the fields researchers actually filter | Collections are searched by date, place, name and type in combination, which is nothing like how a content site is queried. |
| Deep pagination | Cursor-based rather than offset-based | Offset paging gets linearly slower with depth, and researchers routinely go thousands of pages in - the exact case nobody tests. |
| Scan derivatives | Generated at ingest, including reading-resolution sizes | Archive masters are deliberately enormous, so producing browse sizes on request makes the first researcher to open an item wait for all of it. |
| URL permanence | Redirect history preserved as part of the collection | Record URLs are cited in published work, and a redesign that changes them silently breaks references nobody can fix afterwards. |
| Backup role | Treated as preservation rather than as insurance | For most archives the site holds the only digital copy of the material, which makes the backup the artefact rather than a safeguard for it. |
Simple, transparent pricing.
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
- 1 WordPress site
- 10 GB NVMe disk
- Free SSL
- Daily backups
- One-click deployment
- Support tickets
- 5 WordPress sites
- 50 GB NVMe disk
- Free SSL
- Daily backups
- One-click deployment
- Priority support tickets
- 20 WordPress sites
- 200 GB NVMe disk
- Free SSL
- Daily backups
- One-click deployment
- Dedicated support
Questions, answered.
How many records can the site hold?
Why does deep pagination time out?
Will old record URLs keep working after a redesign?
How are large scans handled?
Keep the collection reachable.
Move the archive across. Migration is free, every record included.