Do you have to have built my website?

No, and usually I have not. Taking over a site somebody else wrote is normal work. I will read it first and tell you honestly whether it is worth maintaining or whether you would be better off rebuilding. Sometimes the answer is that it is fine and only needs somebody paying attention.

What counts as a change?

Text, photos, prices, opening hours, a new page, a form field. Up to an hour a month, which covers almost everybody. If a month needs more than that I tell you before I do it rather than after.

No minimum term, a month's notice either way. I would rather you stayed because it is working than because leaving is awkward.

You mention a free website. What is the catch?

There is one, and it is worth saying plainly. If you do not have a site yet I build you a one page site at no charge when you take the plan. Everything lives on that page: what you do, your prices, your hours, your photos and how somebody reaches you. You supply the text and photos, and the first year's domain is included. The catch is the plan itself, at £49 a month. The website is genuinely free. The hosting and the upkeep are what you pay for.

What happens to the domain after the first year?

The first year is included. After that, renewal runs about £12 to £15 a year.

Somebody actually looking after your website

Most small business websites are looked after by nobody. They were built once, handed over, and whoever built them moved on. Then the certificate expires, the plugins fall a year behind, and the backup set up on day one has been failing quietly since March.

None of that announces itself. You find out when a customer mentions the site says "Not secure", or when it goes down and there is nobody to ring.

It does not matter whether I built the site. Most of the ones I look after were written by somebody else.

What you get

Hosting on a Linux server I run and patch myself, not resold from somebody else
A TLS certificate that renews on its own, and gets checked rather than assumed
Daily off-site backups, tested by restoring them
Security updates and version upgrades, applied and verified
Uptime monitoring, so I find out it is down before you do
Up to an hour of content changes a month

Who it's for

Anyone whose website is currently maintained by nobody, or who is about to discover that the person who built it three years ago has stopped answering emails.

How it's priced

£49 a month, no minimum term, whether or not I built the site. If you do not have a website yet, I build you a one page site at no charge when you take the plan, with the first year's domain included.

Case study

Systems I manage

The backup that had not failed

The problem. A server I run flagged its own backups as failing. I believed the banner and wrote down that the most important machine I administer had no backup. It had eight, one a day, the most recent from the previous evening. What had actually broken was a manual export almost nobody presses, taking a different path through the same code.

What I did.

Counted the files on disk before accepting what the status page said about them
Traced the real fault to a module that was never a dependency, and fixed it without upgrading a live server pinned on purpose
Moved the backups off the machine they were protecting, pulled from the far end so a compromised server cannot reach the copies

Outcome. The two things worth fixing had never raised a warning, because neither of them was an error. That is the argument for paying somebody to look: alerts tell you what broke, and nobody sends you an alert about the backup sitting on the disk it is meant to survive.

The full write-up →

Questions people ask

Do you have to have built my website?: No, and usually I have not. Taking over a site somebody else wrote is normal work. I will read it first and tell you honestly whether it is worth maintaining or whether you would be better off rebuilding. Sometimes the answer is that it is fine and only needs somebody paying attention.
What counts as a change?: Text, photos, prices, opening hours, a new page, a form field. Up to an hour a month, which covers almost everybody. If a month needs more than that I tell you before I do it rather than after.
Am I tied in?: No minimum term, a month's notice either way. I would rather you stayed because it is working than because leaving is awkward.
You mention a free website. What is the catch?: There is one, and it is worth saying plainly. If you do not have a site yet I build you a one page site at no charge when you take the plan. Everything lives on that page: what you do, your prices, your hours, your photos and how somebody reaches you. You supply the text and photos, and the first year's domain is included. The catch is the plan itself, at £49 a month. The website is genuinely free. The hosting and the upkeep are what you pay for.
What happens to the domain after the first year?: The first year is included. After that, renewal runs about £12 to £15 a year.

Talk about your project

Tell me what you're trying to do and roughly what it's worth to you. The first call is free, half an hour, and you get a straight answer about whether I'm the right person.

The other two things I do

Software builds

Web apps, client portals and internal tools. Built, deployed, and running on infrastructure I look after.

Security audits

Find out what is actually exposed, with the evidence attached. Not a scan report you cannot act on.

Servers and infrastructure

Provisioning, hardening and keeping Linux servers running. Including being the person who gets the call.