Support and Maintenance

Ongoing technical support, updates and monitoring, so someone is responsible when something breaks.

What you get

Ongoing technical support, updates and monitoring, so problems are found and fixed before your customers are the ones reporting them.

Websites and systems are not appliances. They sit on software that changes underneath them, they accumulate content, and they depend on certificates and services that expire. Left alone for long enough, everything drifts towards broken.

Who this is for

• Organisations whose site was built once and has not been touched since
• Businesses with nobody internally responsible for the website
• Anyone who found out their site was down because a customer called
• Teams running a system they depend on with no support arrangement
• Companies whose original developer has become unreachable

What is included

• Monitoring, so an outage is noticed by us rather than by your customers
• Software and security updates applied and checked
• Backups running, and verified by restoring one
• Certificate and domain renewals tracked before they expire
• Content and small changes done on request
• A route to reach a person when something is wrong

Being told before your customers tell you

The difference between a good and bad support arrangement is usually who notices first.

An unmonitored site can be down for a day before anyone realises, and the cost is not the downtime, it is the enquiries that went nowhere and the impression left on people who will not come back. Monitoring means the problem is being worked on before most people have seen it.

The same applies to expiry. Certificates and domains fail on a date known well in advance, which makes them the easiest outages to prevent and the most embarrassing to suffer.

Updates, carefully

Updates fix security holes and occasionally break things, so applying them blindly and refusing to apply them are both bad approaches.

We apply them, check the site still works properly afterwards, and keep the means to roll back. That is the whole discipline, and it is why an unmaintained site eventually becomes both insecure and fragile at once.

How we work

We agree what is covered and what is not, in plain terms, so there is no argument later about whether something counts.

Small changes are just done. Larger pieces of work are quoted separately, and we tell you which is which before starting rather than afterwards. You get a record of what was done rather than an invoice that says "maintenance".

You keep ownership of everything throughout. Support is a service we provide, not a hold we have over your website.

Questions we are often asked

Do you only support sites you built? No. We take on existing sites, though we will look at what is there first and tell you honestly what condition it is in.

What counts as a small change? Wording, images, adding a page, updating details. If something is larger we say so before doing it, not after.

How quickly do you respond? Response expectations are agreed upfront so they are a commitment rather than a hope. A site that is down is treated differently from a wording change.

Do you keep backups? Yes, and we test restoring them. A backup nobody has restored is an assumption.

Can we stop whenever we want? Yes. Everything is in your name and you can take it elsewhere. We would rather keep clients by being useful.

What if we already have someone doing this? Then you may not need us. We will say so.