Simple Guide to Website Management & Hosting
All our customers at Get Leads use our Website management services which include an element of hosting. This article has been designed to make things as simple for you to understand as possible without going into the next level of jargon you don’t need to know. Just to be clear if you’re marketing agency is selling you a care plan it may be exactly the same thing as our website management but it may not include hosting or domain. It might just be a retainer to remotely manage your website without the hosting, plugin updates and some of the other features we offer.
Why you might need website management services though might be questionable if you’ve come from years and years of not paying for the service with an old static website. I do get it, costs have skyrocketed in 2024 across the board whether it be electricity, houses or digital subscriptions. Nobody is happy about it while mostly our wages have stayed the same. Where can you cut costs then, where can you find the money to pay those important things you must have while getting rid of the optional extras.
Why do you need Website Management or Care Plan?
There’s loads of hosting companies out there charging as little as $100 per years for their cut rate hosting. However hosting makes up around 30-40% of our website management plan and while this might be seen to represent closer to $300-$400 dollars a year the cut rate hosting is usually hosting with thousands of other people, off-shore, sharing resources and opening yourself up to not only a slow site but also security. We only use the best, the fastest in VPS servers and never load them up beyond 50% utilisation.
You need website management because you 100% need your business website online, your presence to all of your customers needs to be up and running and free from malware and have someone who knows what they’re doing a call away. There’s no questions at this point how important having a top performing, secure website is. None of us like having to pay any bill though and perhaps you’ve had someone contact you offering to manage it for less. Compare your features and the time needed every week.
What makes up the other 60-70% of costs?
- Hours and hours of time during business hours, outside of business hours and on weekends
- Weekly off-site Backups that can be restored within minutes. Checks on these as they fail.
- SSL certificates get issued every 90 days, if this doesn’t happen then we’ll investigate.
- Monitoring – 5 minute uptime monitor checks per website.
- Your website Fonts – often have a monthly charge, we include this from our Adobe account.
- Website plugin licensing subscriptions – unfortunately every website has a plugin that has a yearly costs we pay for you. Ask us what they might be if you’re interested. Cost to purchase independently is usually between $300-$630 per year.
- MANUAL plugin updates – Weekly checks on your site and updates. You should not rely on automatic as it always leads to broken sites.
- Ongoing firewall updates, also manual these are separate to the hosting infrastructure using a web application type firewall. (WAF)
- Monthly reporting – what’s been happening with your site, updates, traffic etc.
- MailGun – External mail transactor & audit log of mail that get’s sent from your site and ongoing checks.
- 1x Domain – usually a .com.au is packaged with your plan.
- Proxy Firewall – Integrated DNS which connects your domain to your website hosting infrastructure.
- Second Level Authentication – 2FA or the ability to use mobile app based codes together with your login.
- SMS available if customers want a contact form to send them an SMS as well.
- 5 minute content updates usually done free of charge.
- Email configuration and reporting against 3rd party attackers sending invoices from your domain.
- Google Paid Services (many you may not be aware of)
- Google maps embedded on your site impressions
- Google recaptcha or protection on website forms
Can’t I just avoid all this with a hosted website builder (Wix, SquareSpace)
A short note on the DIY builders, there are some benefits in using systems like these but in essence they are designed for the beginner website and lack features and functionality that you get with a WordPress based website. Designers who lack technical skills often play in this space to make a quick buck which they hate me for pointing this out.
When it comes to the above features a lot of this is taken care of for you but at what cost? You may as well have a templated yellow pages ad because your ability to stand out has been severely compromised here.
If it’s for security then forget that as well in 2024 SquareSpace had one of the largest issues with their domain porting from Google which lead to thousands of sites going down for weeks with little support. You don’t need to go far on Google to find thousands of posts and articles on reddit and other discussion boards talking about how bad hosted website builder support services are.
I’ve written loads of articles on the cons of these systems, here’s a few:
Website Licensing, dependency services
If you had a website built maybe 10-20 years ago, it could exist independently without relying on any external services. Today, however, your website depends on multiple layers of different services to function properly. Most people are not aware of these services. They are typically included, installed, and configured when your website is launched.
The issue here is that you might think your website is independent and will continue to run without any need for these third-party services. Unfortunately, many of these services require ongoing charges. It’s best to bundle these charges with a website management package, like the one we offer at GetLeads.
Each website we manage involves multiple licensing elements. These licenses are not always a one-time cost. For example, your website might use five different Google services that incur ongoing charges. Additionally, the emails sent from your website use a specialised transactional server like Mailgun, which is more reliable than typical hosting servers and also comes with its own costs. Sound like it’s a bit of a complex nightmare? Well that’s where we make things simple and charge the one cost that covers everything.
Onboarding Websites built by other Agencies
We generally prefer to build a website from scratch rather than taking over one created by another web design agency. This preference stems from the fact that web designers often change, yet the need for continuous website management persists. Many customers may not be fully aware of this ongoing requirement.
When we take over a website from another agency, we invest several hours in understanding its structure and functionality. This involves examining any custom plugins specifically developed for the website and reviewing the licensing for each plugin. We also assess any dependent services to determine if they need to be reconfigured or if we should integrate our own services instead.
Transferring a website involves more than just moving a database and files. Initially, the website might seem to be functioning well, but issues can arise if the previous agency or developer discontinues the API key or other service accesses. For example, you might discover that your maps no longer display correctly, or your reCAPTCHA fails, leading to a loss of contact submissions for months. These are tough lessons that highlight the complexities of website management.
Are you prepared for the extra cost, the extra pain or is your IT guy prepared and equipped with the website knowledge to fix the problems that may come, 1 month, 6 months after the move has been completed?
Plugin security
Moreover, there are various functional plugins that require yearly licensing to maintain security. When people get a website built, they often overlook these aspects. They assume once the site is built, all they need to pay for is hosting and domain registration. Unfortunately, that’s just the beginning.
Importance of staying up to date
I’ve learned that discussing security with clients is the most effective way to capture their attention regarding website maintenance. Sometimes, this might feel like the pest inspector who insists on annual visits to charge fees. Unfortunately, website hacking is a frequent occurrence. Last year, the ACCC reported that Australians lost over $16 million to redirection scams, many of which happened in the ways we’ve discussed.
SquareSpace hosted website builder compromised
It’s important to note that this issue isn’t confined to WordPress. If you believe platforms like Squarespace, Wix, Drupal, or Joomla are safer, you are mistaken. All these platforms have their own vulnerabilities. For instance, hackers recently exploited a flaw in Squarespace’s migration process following their acquisition of Google domains. This breach compromised nearly 10 million domains.
As a side note, if you’re on SquareSpace and you need to break free we have a service for upgrading your tired old SquareSpace Site. Or if you don’t understand how SquareSpace isn’t the next step for many businesses in breaking free of hosting and technical problems you can read this article here.
What does keeping your site up to date involve
So, what does website security maintenance involve? It’s quite time-consuming. Our job isn’t just to check if your website is running. We monitor the security versions of plugins installed on your website. We ensure there are no new releases or updates needed. Moreover, we check if these updates are compatible with other elements of your website to prevent any disruptions.
Communicating Value in Website Management
One of the biggest problems I have with any clients who may choose to leave is that they don’t understand what they’re missing out on. They think it’s website hosting and that’s it.
The excellent news is that Get Leads AU has a premium website management service available to all of our clients that takes the technical side of out of the pain it is to run an online presence. This includes a comprehensive hosting and maintenance plan where we handle everything backend so that you don’t have to.
A few features of our comprehensive package includes:
- Regular plugin updates – we’ll apply updates either as they come from the vendor or manually batch these to one of our regular bulk patch days where your website is checked after the updates is applied.
- Uptime Monitoring and Restore – When something goes wrong we pride ourselves on knowing about it before our customers. We run regular checks on all our managed sites at 5 minute intervals 24/7.
- Performance Monitoring – All servers have bandwidth, disk, cpu and memory constantly monitored with alerts set to be sent if anything isn’t quite right. No server has more than 50% of it’s resources depleted before a review and upgrade may be required to meet it’s demands.
- Best Practice Web Design – Where we’re different to the rest is not only making sure something is working on the front end but imagine if your website has errors on the backend. It’s like a car with something faulty, eventually you’ll have to fix it and it may even cost you more than you’d ever expect.
Nobody want’s to risk the reputation of a business because of a website being hacked. It’s certainly not a good look and could even spell the end for some.
Other articles about website management
Final words on website management
I really love my customers and I love offering ongoing support to their websites and online marketing, we feel like we’re on a journey with them and our commitment to their success is just as important as our own. We continue to improve the features on these plans usually at no extra costs. We go away to do extra trainings on weekends with WordCamps and we actually send you a personal email every now and then and a phone call when it’s renewal time.
Here’s a few other articles on the topic of website management:
- Switching hosting to a budget provider
- Why our Website Hosting and Management is the best
- Proof: The fastest Websites in Wagga
We’re human though and while we think we’re doing a good job there’s always room for improvement. I’d encourage you to send us feedback. Help us make your website services even better into 2025.
