Half of our tagline is “Kept running” — and that’s not decoration. A website isn’t a thing you build once and forget; it’s a thing that has to keep working every day, through software updates, security threats, traffic spikes, and the slow rot of stale dependencies. Maintenance is the unglamorous work that keeps “built right” from quietly becoming “broken.”
Here’s what website maintenance actually covers, what happens when it’s skipped, and how we structure it.
What “maintenance” actually includes
When people hear “maintenance” they often picture occasional text edits. The text edits are the small part. The real work is keeping the foundation healthy:
Hosting, DNS, and SSL
Your site needs a server to live on, DNS to route visitors to it, and an SSL certificate so browsers trust it. Certificates expire. DNS gets misconfigured. Hosting needs to stay paid and provisioned. When any of these lapse, your site goes down or starts showing scary “Not Secure” warnings.
Backups
Things go wrong — a bad edit, a failed update, a server problem. Regular backups mean a bad day is a quick restore instead of a catastrophe. No backups means a single mistake can erase work you can’t get back.
Uptime monitoring
You should not find out your site is down because a customer emails you. Monitoring watches your site around the clock and alerts when something breaks, so it can be fixed before it costs you business.
Security and software updates
Every site is built on software, and software gets security patches. Skipping them is how sites get hacked, defaced, or quietly turned into spam machines. Staying current is ongoing, deliberate work.
What breaks when a site is unmaintained
This isn’t hypothetical. An unmaintained site tends to fail in predictable ways:
- An SSL certificate expires and every visitor sees a security warning.
- A security hole goes unpatched and the site gets compromised.
- Something breaks silently — a form stops sending, checkout fails — and nobody notices for weeks because nothing is watching.
- There’s no backup when a problem finally does hit, turning a small issue into a rebuild.
The pattern is always the same: the cost of not maintaining shows up all at once, at the worst possible time, and it’s far higher than the monthly plan would have been.
How our monitoring works
Behind our care plans is Sentinel, our monitoring layer — synthetic uptime checks watching key pages and endpoints so problems surface fast instead of festering. The goal is simple: catch issues before your customers do.
Our care plans
We require a plan on every site we host, because hosting an unmaintained site does you no favors. The plans scale to how hands-on you want us to be:
- Hosting + Monitoring — $39/mo. The lightest plan: hosting, DNS, SSL, daily backups, uptime monitoring, and a monthly report.
- Essential — $89/mo.
- Active — $189/mo.
- Managed — $399/mo.
Higher tiers add more proactive work and a bigger allowance for changes and updates. The same tiers cover mobile apps. You can see them on our pricing page.
Why we don’t treat it as optional
A maintenance plan is the difference between a website that’s an asset and one that’s a liability waiting to surface. The build gets you a great site; the plan keeps it a great site. For $39/month, the floor plan costs less than most business subscriptions and prevents the kind of problem that ruins a week.
If your current site is running on hope and an expired certificate, that’s worth fixing. See our care plans on the pricing page, and tell us about your site — we’ll get it on solid ground and keep it there.