Service
Hosting and website care
Websites need looking after. Our care plans keep your site updated, backed up and secure, and give you someone to ask when you need a change, without a support ticket maze.
Who this is for
Care plans suit businesses that would rather not think about their website's plumbing: guest houses in the busy season, engineering firms whose staff are on site, shops with one person doing everything. They also suit organisations whose sites hold enquiries, bookings or orders, where an outage or a hacked site costs real money.
What a care plan includes
| Included | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Managed hosting | Fast, secure hosting with a free SSL certificate, sized for your site |
| Updates | Core, theme and plugin updates, tested on staging before going live |
| Backups | Daily backups kept off-site, with restores tested regularly |
| Monitoring | Uptime and security monitoring, so we usually know before you do |
| Small edits | A monthly allowance for changes: new staff, prices, a new page |
| Monthly note | A short email on what was done and anything to be aware of |
How it works, step by step
- Health check. For sites we did not build, we review software versions, plugins, hosting, backups and security.
- Fix urgent issues. Anything risky is fixed first, and quoted if it is significant.
- Migrate if needed. We move the site to our hosting, or work on yours if you prefer.
- Ongoing care. Updates, backups and monitoring run on a schedule; edits are handled as you send them.
- Annual review. Once a year we look at speed, security and whether the site still fits the business.
Response times
Requests are acknowledged within a working day. Anything that takes your site down, breaks checkout or stops enquiries arriving is treated as urgent and worked on the same day. You deal with the same small team each time, who already know your site.
What drives the cost
Plans are priced monthly. The cost depends on the platform (static sites need much less care than WordPress or WooCommerce), the size and traffic of the site, the number of plugins and integrations, and how many edits you expect each month. Ecommerce sites need more frequent checks than brochure sites.
Common mistakes we see on unmanaged sites
- Plugins not updated for years, with known security issues.
- Backups that exist only on the same server as the site.
- Hosting or the domain registered to a former employee or old agency.
- Domain renewal emails going to an inbox nobody checks.
- Contact forms quietly failing for months.
Rural and slow connections
Many of our clients' customers read sites on weak mobile signal, in the countryside around York or inside thick-walled buildings in the centre. Hosting choices, caching and image handling make a real difference here, and they are part of every care plan.
Who we look after around York
Our care clients include guest houses and cafés in the city centre, professional firms, engineering and logistics companies around Selby and Sherburn, food producers in Ryedale and research companies near the university. What they have in common is that the website matters to the business but nobody on the team has time to look after it. For a guest house, a broken booking button during the Christmas markets is lost income. For an engineering firm, a hacked site that a procurement team happens to visit is a reputational problem.
A worked example
A common situation when we take over a site: the business has a WordPress site built several years ago. There are twenty or so plugins, several of them no longer maintained. Backups are stored on the same server as the site. The domain is registered to a former employee's personal email address, and the contact form has been sending messages to an inbox nobody checks. Our health check would list all of this. We would then move the domain into the business's name, set up off-site backups, replace or remove the abandoned plugins, fix the form and test it, and put the site on a regular update schedule. After that the site needs only routine attention.
What you receive each month
- A short email listing updates applied, backups confirmed and any incidents.
- A note of any edits made from your allowance.
- Anything we think you should know, such as a plugin reaching end of life or a renewal coming up.
How we measure it
Uptime, page speed, successful backups and update status are tracked continuously. Your monthly note includes any incidents and how they were resolved, and we test your contact form regularly so enquiries do not go missing.
Questions
Do I have to host with you?
No. We can maintain a site on your own hosting, though some tasks are easier on ours.
Is there a minimum term?
Care plans run month to month after an initial three months.
What if I need a bigger change?
Anything beyond the monthly allowance is quoted in advance, so there are no surprise bills.
Will you look after a site you did not build?
Yes, after a health check. If it is beyond sensible repair, we will say so.
What happens if I leave?
We hand over the site, backups and all logins. It is your site.