What £49 a month actually covers

Website maintenance is close to a meaningless phrase. Everyone selling it lists the same six words, nobody says what the words do, and the price is usually behind a form.

Mine is £49 a month. Here is every line of it, what each line actually means when it runs, and the parts it does not cover. If you are weighing it up against somebody else’s plan, the useful exercise is asking them these same questions.

Hosting, on a server I run myself

Not resold. The site sits on a Linux box I administer, patch and read the logs on.

That distinction sounds like vanity and is not. When a site is slow I can read the actual nginx access log rather than guessing from somebody’s dashboard, when a header needs changing I change it that afternoon instead of asking, and when something breaks at nine on a Sunday there is nobody for me to open a ticket with and then sit waiting on.

It cuts the other way too, and you should know that before you buy. If the machine has a problem, I am the person fixing it, and I am one person. A large host has staff at three in the morning. I have an alert on my phone.

A certificate that renews on its own, and gets looked at

Every host says certificates renew automatically. They do, right up until they don’t.

Auto-renewal breaks quietly for boring reasons. A DNS record moved. A firewall rule changed. The renewal hook points at a path that stopped existing during some tidy-up nobody wrote down. What makes it nasty is the delay: nothing fails on the day the config changes, because the certificate is still perfectly valid for another two months, so the fault sits there invisible until a Tuesday nine weeks later when the first person to notice is a customer staring at a browser warning.

So it renews automatically and it also gets checked, which are two different promises. The second one is the one worth paying for.

Daily off-site backups, tested by restoring them

The word carrying all the weight in that sentence is tested.

Backups are the easiest thing in this business to sell and the easiest to get wrong, because a job that is quietly failing looks precisely like a job that is working right up until the morning you need it, and by then the difference is the whole business. It sends no email. It raises no alarm. Nothing appears on a status page.

I have written up two of these on my own systems, and both are worth reading if you are deciding whether this line matters: one where a server told me the backups had failed and they had not, and one where every job succeeded every night while the largest database on the box had never been in a backup of any kind. Neither of those raised a warning. Warnings tell you what broke. Nothing warns you about the thing nobody thought to include.

Off-site means the copies do not live on the machine they exist to survive.

Security updates, applied and verified

Two words, and the second one is not decoration. Software updates get installed and then do not run, which is a specific and common failure rather than a theoretical one. A kernel is a file on disk until something boots it. A package manager reports everything installed and current while the running process is whatever was loaded last Tuesday.

I wrote that one up too, on a box of my own that reported itself fully patched while running none of it. Checking what is installed is the easy half.

Uptime monitoring

So I find out before you do. That is the whole feature, and it is worth the line because the alternative is a customer telling you. If it has already happened to you, here is how to read the error page.

An hour of content changes a month

Text, photos, prices, opening hours, a new page, a form field. Up to an hour, which covers almost everybody I look after with room left.

If a month genuinely needs more than an hour, I tell you before I do it rather than putting it on the invoice afterwards. I have never understood the appeal of the other approach.

No minimum term

A month’s notice, either direction. I would rather you stayed because it works than because leaving is awkward, and a twelve month tie-in on a service that costs less than a phone contract is mostly a confession.

It also does not matter whether I built the site. Most of the ones I look after were written by somebody else, and taking one over is ordinary work. I read it first and tell you honestly whether it is worth maintaining or whether you would be better off rebuilding it. Sometimes the answer is that it is fine and just needs somebody paying attention.

The free website, and the catch

If you do not have a site at all, I build you a one page one at no charge when you take the plan. Everything on one page: what you do, your prices, your hours, your photos, how somebody reaches you. You supply the words and the pictures. The first year’s domain is included, and renewal after that runs about £12 to £15 a year.

The catch is the plan. £49 a month, which is what you are actually buying. The page is genuinely free and the upkeep is not, and I would rather write that down than let you work it out at the first invoice.

Four things it does not cover

Worth being specific, because a plan is only honest if the exclusions are as clear as the inclusions.

It is not an SEO campaign. Sites on the plan get the technical housekeeping that stops a search engine tripping over them, which is a real and useful thing, but it is not content strategy and it is certainly not link building.

It is not a rebuild. If the site needs replacing rather than maintaining, that is separate work and I will say so rather than quietly maintaining something that should be scrapped.

It is not unlimited changes. It is an hour.

And it does not cover things that are not websites. If you have a mobile app in an app store, the plan does not carry its releases. I know exactly how that gap feels, having missed a store deadline on one of my own while everything else was being watched.

If what you need is any of those four, ask me about them separately rather than assuming £49 stretches to cover them. It does not, and finding that out in an emergency is the worst possible time.

The full plan is here, with the questions people actually ask.