Recently a client wrote me asking: “I would also like to understand what the maintenance and hosting fee covers exactly, and what is included in that?”
My response:
Our annual hosting and maintenance fee covers the following:
-
-
- Site hosting – the space on servers with our colocations partners (we pay $1,000’s each month to our colocation partner for the servers we use for our clients)
- Bandwidth fees – having your site connected to the internet
- Daily backup service – we backup the site every day on a 24 hour cycle in the event that the site is hacked, gets compromised, has some kind of database error, or anything else that requires us to be able to recover it quickly.
- Regular updates – we manually update the site every time wordpress issues a new release of the core software that runs the site. This happens about once every 2 months.
- Plugin updates – we also update any plugins or extensions on your site – these periodic upgrades are required to keep the site secure from automated hacking attacks from around the world.
- Managing update conflicts – sometimes these updates reveal a conflict or problem between the plugins, the theme we use and wordpress – we resolve these conflicts or find alternate solutions
- Site monitoring – we monitor the site for uptime 24/7 and react to any site downtime when it occurs to determine the issue.
- Record keeping – we keep accurate records of your domain registration account, email handling, and other important logins for you.
- Security – we work with leading website security providers to monitor and protect our sites – we also contract with these providers to assist in rapid site recovery, malware removal, and hardening against emerging threats.
- Service – We have full time staff and contract engineers on call to resolve and address issues around the clock.
- SEO – we register your site with google and monitor it for any SEO issues or crawl errors.
-
Most hosting companies provide basically #1 and #2 on this list. They leave the rest up to you. We are a website management company – we manage the entire infrastructure and support systems around your site and ensure that your site is performing reliably and securely.
Hope that helps! Yes, you can host your site with godaddy.com for $10/month but basically, that would give you the first two bullet points. Otherwise, you would be on your own and if a problem came up likely you would have no recourse for a speedy recovery.
Thanks
Kevin
