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

    Content edits within an agreed scope

    For the things you would rather not do yourself. How many and how large is written into the agreement before the year starts, not interpreted afterwards.

  • 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, how many systems need watching, and the editing scope agreed. 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.

  • How many content edits the year includes, and what counts as new work billed 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.

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?

Those are provider bills rather than labour, so they stay separate — and they should sit in accounts held by the business, not by 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