n3ver25

YEARLY CARE

Website maintenance, so the site does not break in the month nobody looked

Most sites do not break on handover day. They break in month eight, when a library turns out to have a hole in it, a certificate expires, or somebody edits the wrong thing and there is no copy to go back to. A maintenance year is somebody watching those three things for you. From THB 15,000 a year.

Ask for a maintenance quoteSee every package price

Why a site nobody touches still decays

The question I get is fair: if nothing changed, why does it stop working? Because the site is not the thing that changes — everything around it is. Browsers update monthly. Certificates have expiry dates. Providers drop support for old versions. And holes get found in libraries that were fine when the site was built.

So a site left alone for a year is not in the same condition it was in. It is in a slightly worse one, with no warning light, until the day somebody phones to say the site will not open — usually the day a customer was about to get in touch.

The three that break most often

  • The HTTPS certificate expires. The browser puts a full-screen red warning in front of your site. Almost everybody who sees it leaves, and most do not come back.
  • A library the site depends on gets a published vulnerability. Published means the method is public too, and people scan for sites that have not updated.
  • There is no backup. The difference between losing half a day and losing everything is whether a recent copy exists.

What a maintenance year covers

On a monthly cycle for twelve months — not waiting for something to break and then calling.

  • 01

    Monthly updates and security patches

    Check which of the libraries the site depends on have shipped fixes, apply them, and test that the site still behaves the same before it goes live.

  • 02

    Weekly backups

    Files and database both, kept for several rounds back, so you can still recover when you only notice the problem days later.

  • 03

    System and log checks

    Unusual requests, pages starting to fail, anything getting slower than it was — found before it becomes something a customer runs into.

  • 04

    Three content edits a year

    For the things you would rather not do yourself — a price change across a page, a batch of images, content that needs the layout reworked. New features and new pages are not among them: those are new work, priced separately.

  • 05

    A written report every month

    What was updated, what looked wrong, how many backups ran. So you can see what the money bought instead of paying into silence.

Code-built sites only — no WordPress

This is a scope statement, not a preference. A site built from code has everything it depends on in one place, and it is possible to know what an update will affect.

A site assembled from dozens of plugins by dozens of authors is different: updating one can break another, and nobody controls which of them stops being maintained. Taking that on would mean pricing a risk that cannot be measured, which is not fair to either side.

The longer version is in the article on why I do not use WordPress .

Price, and what to settle first

Maintenance runs THB 15,000 to 30,000 a year, depending on the size of the site and how many systems need watching. It includes three content edits a year, and work happens on a monthly cycle for the length of the agreement.

Three things belong in writing before any maintenance year starts, whoever you hire. They are the three people argue about later.

  • Three content edits a year; new features and new pages are new work, priced separately
  • How fast a reply is promised, and whether that counts business hours only
  • Who holds the domain, hosting and third-party accounts, and who pays those bills

On my work these sit in the scope note you get before anything starts. If it does not match what you understood, that is the moment to fix it — nothing has been paid yet.

What the one-year cover includes, and what it does not

Every package carries a year of cover from handover, with no maintenance agreement needed. The scope is written out here so it is not interpreted two different ways when something goes wrong.

  • 01

    Covered — the site going down

    If the site stops loading because of the work delivered, getting it back is covered for a year at no further cost.

  • 02

    Covered — functionality behaving differently

    Something that was agreed and worked, and later does not: a form that stops submitting, a button that fails, a page that breaks on a device we agreed to support.

  • 03

    Covered — speed and performance

    If performance drops below what it was at handover, and it is not the result of content or images added since, fixing it is covered.

  • 04

    Not covered — new features and new pages

    A new system, a new page, or a capability outside the original scope is new work and priced separately, however small it is.

  • 05

    Not covered — content changes

    Text, images, prices and the information on the pages. Those are yours to change through the back office on packages that include one, or they fall inside a maintenance agreement.

  • 06

    Not covered — things outside my hands

    Problems caused by somebody else editing the code, by third-party services the site connects to, and the domain and hosting bills, which belong to the providers.

Questions about yearly maintenance

Can I skip a maintenance agreement?

Yes, and not every site is worth one. A single page with no back office, no changing data and no user input carries little enough risk to leave alone and call when needed. A site with logins, payments or customer data should have somebody watching it.

Will you maintain a site somebody else built?

If it is built from code and was handed over completely, yes. The first step is looking at the code, the hosting account and what it depends on. If it turns out not to be in a state I can take responsibility for, I will say so with reasons rather than take it on and find out later.

If the site goes down at 2am, is it fixed immediately?

That depends on the response terms in the agreement, which are set against what the business actually needs. A shop selling through the night and an office site nobody opens after 6pm should not pay the same to be watched.

Does maintenance include domain and hosting fees?

Maintenance is a separate amount from the domain and the hosting. A build already includes the first year of both; after that they are provider bills you pay directly. Either way the accounts belong to the business rather than to whoever maintains the site, so you can change maintainer without asking permission.

How is this different from the one-year cover on a build?

Cover means the work delivered does what was agreed. Maintenance is new work every month so problems do not arise in the first place. Different things, and the scope of both is written down before work starts.

Send the link and I will look first

What it is built with, what systems it has, and how closely you want it watched.

Talk about maintenance