Website Hosting & Care Plan

What is a Care Plan?

A Website Care Plan allows us to: 

  • monitor your website to find or predict any issues,
  • maintain the high performance and standards delivered at launch, and,
  • continually make improvements to your website as the digital landscape inevitably shifts and changes

Why do you need a Care Plan?

Your website is vulnerable

Just like your credit card, your car, your office, or your email, your website is a vulnerable business asset. If your website goes offline for a week what does that mean for your staff, clients, or customers? What does it mean for your organization or business? With a Care Plan in place you will never be without your website for an extended period of time.

Your website could become a liability

Updates, monitoring, and reviews are the key areas of the Care Plan. Without performance monitoring you can never be sure if the website is happily contributing to your mission, or quietly becoming a liability…

If they trust your website, they’ll trust you

Keeping a website up-to-date contributes to the stability of your organization and the satisfaction of your customers/potential customers, not to mention the mental health of your staff. A poorly performing website signals that you might be a poorly performing organization.

Neglect can lead to an expensive recovery operation

Once upon a time we agreed to the task of “rescuing” a website. The owner knew the website had been neglected, and they needed help. 

What were our steps? 

Oddly enough, they sound similar to rescuing injured humans from a dangerous building:

  1. Gain entry and evaluate what’s inside.
  2. Stabilize the patients.
  3. Move the patients.
  4. Reach a safe location, reassess the patients and deploy the most appropriate support measures.
  5. Feed, water, nurture.
  6. Ideally — create a stronger, safer situation than existed before.

To put the cost of this operation in perspective, Step 1 alone cost $1,000. Password gathering, piecing together a picture, following wires and threads, and fumbling around. Yes, fumbling. No one out there wants to spend good money on fumbling. This is why a Website Care Plan is critical!

What is included in the Website Hosting and Care Plan?

During the pre-launch phase of your website build we will agree on a specific level of care with you, and you will sign our customized contract. It will include the items below and specify varying levels of focus for each.

On request, we can provide a Website Owners Manual with a break-down of software and plugins used to run your website, some of these have annual costs associated and these costs are covered in your Custom Care Plan.

Care Plan Outline

Hosting

  • WordPress website hosting
  • Regular backups
  • CDN
  • SSL Certificate

Updates

  • Timely WordPress core software and theme and plugin updates
  • Goal: Maintain the integrity of the infrastructure

Ongoing Monitoring

Accessibility Monitoring
  • Monthly or quarterly
  • Goal: Maintain WCAG conformance
Performance Monitoring
  • Monthly or quarterly
  • Goal: Maintain or continually improve website speed, and address issues that many impact search engines or humans ability to understand the website

Consultations

  • Monthly or quarterly
  • Goal: Update you on the state of the website. Understand new or changing goals and how the website can help. Teach you to fish, or strategize to build your internal team of accessible website contributors.

Security Review

  • Monthly, quarterly, or annually
  • Goal: Protect your vulnerable assets, use our knowledge to help you avoid worst-case scenarios like being held to ransom (this is a very present threat to small and large organizations alike).

Accessibility Monitoring

For our website accessibility remediation and website design/build clients, we offer an ongoing Website Accessibility Monitoring Plan.

Care Plan Payments

You can choose to pay annually (preferred) or monthly. On-line/digital payments only, Visa or Mastercard accepted.

Care plan payments are due within fourteen (14) calendar days from the date of the invoice.

Late Payments

Late payments will be charged an additional fee of $35.00, and the balance due shall be immediately subject to a 1.00% monthly finance charge. Thirty (30) days past the due date on the invoice the website will be taken offline until outstanding payment and late fees are remitted in full.

Canceling your Care Plan

We require thirty (30) days written notice to cease work and close your account. Any regular maintenance scheduled within those 30 days will be performed and invoiced as normal. You will need to open an account with the hosting company and send us the account name. After 30 days we will transfer the website to your care.

Changing Providers

You may request a transfer of your website to a new care-taker. This transfer activity carries a minimum cost of $300. Further time spent coordinating the transfer will be billed at our hourly rate of $150 p/h.

Our Goal

Thinking back to our client with the critically ill website, we hope you never experience the sinking feeling of learning something is broken and (as a result) your clients or customers are losing faith and going elsewhere.

With a Care Plan in place those scenarios are highly unlikely — let’s keep it that way.

Remember, our remediation or build clients are encouraged to add a Website Accessibility Monitoring Plan.