It’s time for another entry in our series, Lance’s Long-Winded Emails. We offer ongoing maintenance & monitoring for WordPress websites, and in fact, we require that commitment with any website project we build. It’s in everyone’s best interests to invest in keeping the website up-to-date and healthy! You want your site’s visitors to see your services, products and expertise – not error messages, and especially not a hacked site featuring ads for certain pills that solve certain problems or hardcore porn.

But you’ll likely notice that your hosting provider offers an inexpensive service for auto-updating your site’s theme and plugins – and it costs quite a bit less than our service. So why not just save some money and tell us to forget it?

Key benefits of trusting your Web Development Company (and not your host) to maintain your WordPress Site

  • Automated vs. Hands-On Maintenance: This is the primary factor in the cost difference.We do our maintenance by hand on a monthly basis, with a real person reviewing each update and testing the site after the updates in order to minimize the potential for any issues to have arisen as a result of the updates. It is actually quite common for an update to have an unexpected effect on the site, and when that happens, a person with expertise about the site and how it’s built is required in order to determine the best way to resolve the issue. Often it includes a multi-factor approach of temporarily restoring the site from a backup while working on a long-term resolution and deploying it along with the original update.

    A web host just activates software that runs updates automatically and blindly. There is no review for issues or protection if something goes wrong, besides the potential that if the issue was catastrophic enough, the software would detect it and automatically restore a backup. The host has no expertise about the site or how it was built and therefore is unable to actually resolve the issue. We never recommend automatic updates and in fact if the website’s theme is updated without us, it voids our software warranty.

  • Hacking Protection: If despite all the protections in place, the site still gets hacked, we will resolve the hacking issue at no additional charge under our agreement. The host’s services do not cover this, and the out-of-pocket costs to restore a site from a hack can be very significant.
  • Third-Party Monitoring: We use an independent, third-party monitoring system to monitor the site for outages. It is not recommended to use your host to monitor its own uptime.
  • Updates are performed monthly on our own schedule: It is common and even expected that at any given time, a user might log in and see that there are updates available to their plugins or theme – especially mid-month. Our updates are performed manually, usually the last week of the month. Any notices indicating updates available can be ignored – we’re on it!
  • Save on up-front costs during the site build: Our website development project fees are based on the requirement to engage in post-launch maintenance with us on an ongoing basis. We deeply value establishing a long-term relationship with our client sharing a commitment to keeping the site healthy and working to bring ROI for their business. We value that relationship so much that we discount our initial project fees for the one-time project. Without that commitment, our one-time costs would substantially increase.

Navigating your web hosting company’s upsells isn’t easy.

We’re always happy to discuss these types of questions with you, and it’s good to know that our one of our core values at Ascent is selfless service – in other words, it’s not about us – it’s about you. You can trust us to give you advice that is in the ultimate best interests of your company, because we believe that when we do that, ultimately we’ll be blessed by doing the right thing. So drop us a line & we can talk through any hosting/website questions you’re facing, and help you find the best solutions.