9. Maintenance
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A website needs to be kept up to date, to prevent security breaches as well as add new features and functionality to websites. Next, all software requires updates, there are constant threats and computing is always evolving and improving over time. To keep things ticking over smoothly a website requires constant maintenance. Rarely is software a set-it-and-forget-it endeavour?
Website Downtime
All sites under Media Surgery control have 24/7 monitoring. We get text and email alerts every time there is any downtime with the servers they are sitting on. We don't have people up 24/7 monitoring websites but we're not bad. An example would be a new client that came on board recently. There is a disk space error and the site went down on Friday night around 11p Whilst we only picked up the alerting text on Saturday morning, we immediately sorted the issue and before the client was up on Saturday it was fixed. The client praised us and he, unfortunately, had an issue with his previous web agency when it was a bank holiday. His website went down on a Thursday and the web agency only sorted the issue into the next week on Wednesday. We don't provide a robust service 24/7, but we do provide a solid care and maintenance package to look after client sites. Although I've just spoken about downtime a lot, it's rare. Last week all our sites had a 99.89% uptime performance. In more weeks than not it's 100% uptime.
Contact? Get in touch with us - We are web site designers in Aberdeen.
Proactive approach
We like to be proactive with software updates. Many agencies just happen to update the software they are editing or making changes to the site. If there are no changes then they don't update the site's software and before you know it, a year has passed and you are running software with many version stop's back. Whilst this may suffice, security updates need to be taken more seriously than that and updates notices should bring prompt immediate action. Unfortunately in the world, there are many unscrupulous characters looking to cause harm and scam people. By keeping software updated you stop them in their tracks. Hackers always look to make their lives easier and target older sites that haven't been updated in a while. Unless your site is kept up to date, your site can fall into the category of easy victims by intruders looking for a quick hack.
We charge a monthly fee of £200 to keep sites up to date. Our content management system(CMS) of choice is Craft CMS, and whilst a safe and secure product it is not immune to software updates which prevent security breaches. One of the reasons we switched from WordPress to Craft is that Craft has a much better record with security than WordPress. See WordPress vs Craft for more information on why we decide to use Craft more often than not.
Extras
Many of our clients run PPC campaigns and management of that account is included in the monthly fee. That's 2 hours of maintenance included every month. There is a kick-off fee for PPC but no more monthly costs for campaign management unless the account needs more intensive management, which usually isn't required.
Within that monthly fee, another 2 additional hours are included for general edits to the site. You may want another section added, a modified graphic or something in the footer updated. These updates are included in that monthly fee. We are normally quite lenient with the additional 2 hours. If it occasionally takes 3 or 4 hours, then there wouldn't be an additional fee on top of the maintenance fee. We do believe in maintenance packages, we don't believe in nickel-and-diming clients for small jobs which help clients' businesses achieve their goals.