Hosting & Care Package
Websites are like gardens...
They need regular tending, pruning and mulching to make sure things are growing according to the plan and that there are no invasive species threatening to kill your leafy babies.
A lot goes into looking after a website.
Now, you could do it all yourself.
You could line up a month’s worth of YouTube tutorial videos to learn how WordPress works, how servers work, how the plugins on your site work, sleep 2 hours a day and turn yourself into a jibbering, coffee stained mess trying to get to grips with it all.
Or…
You can simply hand all of that stuff off to me so you can get on with your life and do the things that actually make you happy/money. Happy money. 👍🏽😎
Think of the Care Package as insurance, as being Proactive rather than Reactive. Regularly making sure that everything is ticking over nicely means that should anything go wrong it’s likely to be one small thing to fix rather than a whopping great problem made up of lots of little ones!
Hosting & Site Care
When I build your site from scratch I will host it too. This means I will also create a “Staging Site” where we can make design and feature decisions away from prying eyes…
The cost of the site will include hosting, set up of some email accounts and site care for the duration of the payment plan.
So what do you get in the Hosting & Care Package?
Well, Lots of things...
But the question is, do you really care about all the techincal details? Below is a broad strokes overview of it all (minus as much jargon as I can strip out!).
The main thing is peace of mind
We’re all busy people: there are the things you do that make you money or make you happy and then there are all the other things life throws at you that intrude on your limited bandwidth and take you away from those things (and make you miserable/frustrated/angry).
Your website shouldn’t be one of those intrusive things.
By having it hosted and maintained by JRWP you don’t have to worry. If you have any issues, just drop me a line and I’ll get on it for you.
Speed & Delivery
Your site will be hosted on really fast servers and use caching (see this article on different Caching types if you’re feeling nerdy or can’t sleep!) to ensure that they load as fast as possible for your site’s visitors.
Sites that load fast are better for Search Engines and humans alike. Nobody likes to wait around for a page to load when they’ve come to you to buy something or to get that vital nugget of information and your site shouldn’t make them!
Image sizes, file locations and delivery will all be optimised to ensure your site is as fast as possible too.
security & Uptime monitoring
Now, here’s the thing: nothing is ever 100% secure.
As fast as a new method of securing a website comes into existence, some nefarious nerd is out there reverse engineeering it and within a disturbingly short period of time it’s been cracked!
However, hacks on most websites use similar methods and many of them are essentially blunt instruments (and generally not targetted at you). As such there are some generally very effective ways to secure your site.
Your site will be built using best practices and industry leading tools to ensure that it’s as safe as it can be. However, all of that counts for nought if you change your username to admin and use the password 1234567890!
If anything bad happens, your site will send me a flare in real time if it goes offline which will allow me to investigate as soon as I can (within reason, I need to sleep too!).
Back it up!
Adjacent to site security is Back Ups.
In the extreme event that you do get hacked and you lose access to your site or you tinker here and there and suddenly you’ve done “something?!” and the site is gone, having a recent pre-hack/mistake backup is essential.
Your site will be backed up weekly in a couple of locations to ensure that unless someone turns off the internet everywhere, there’s always a copy somewhere that can be reinstalled.
More regular backups can be scheduled for a wee bit extra cash…
Under the hood
Your site is built with WordPress; WP is a constantly developing and evolving ecosystem that needs to be regularly audited and maintained.
WordPress regularly release new iterations and security patches that have to be implemented to ensure that everything runs smoothly. Then when you add in the plugins and theme(s) that all need to be updated, doing this is the kind of tedious legwork you shouldn’t have to do…
Plus doing them wrong (there really is a “right” way…) can create a cascade of problems that can take a long old while to unpick!
SEO: The dark arts...
There is only one shortcut to ranking high in search listings: buy it.
There are other things that can be done but that’s the simplest, most effective way to get to the top of Page 1 on the Googles. (Honestly, that’s not even a guarantee as people with all sorts of shady objectives can also buy the same keywords and hijack people’s searches to list their spammy ad link infested bombsites ahead of you… 🥺)
If buying your way up is not an option then know that your site will have SEO tools baked into it to do the best job of plan B.
Google loves new content; new images, new text, new answers to questions so you can feed it that way and work your way up by becoming a regularly updating and changing source of information.
I can’t guarantee, and I never will, that I can get your site on the front page of Google and Bing etc but I can give it a damn good fighting chance!
It can be done, though; here’s an example of a site I’ve built that’s used an albeit very specific search term that’s on page one:
Your Domain name
Will I buy your Domain Name for you?
Well, I can… But I suggest it’s better for you to buy it. It’s your brand, the name of your business or product or service; it’s much better all round if YOU own it from the get-go.
I’ll happily look after it and point it at the right place but you should really own it.
Email addresses
There’s something to be said for how much more professional it looks to have an email address with your domain name in it.
Compare receiving an email from bigsweatyfeet269@hotmail.com v yourname@yourdomain.com
Which one screams “I was drunk when I set this up…” and which one screams, “I take my business/product/service seriously…”?
Most sites won’t need too many custom email addresses so up to 5 are included in any site build. They come with complete instructions on how to integrate them in to your email client (Outlook, Mail, Gmail etc…). It’s a relatively painless process and I’ll guide you through it.
This integration allows you to send and receive emails centrally without having to open each webmail account individually.
Vistor tracking & site usage reports
Data is King/Queen on the internet but it can become addictive or overwhelming.
I will install features that allow for tracking of users (anonymously, GDPR and all that…) and produce monthly reports that give a breakdown of who, what, where and when.
I can install Google analytics too so that you can monitor things yourself in your Google account.
I’ll try to avoid overloading you with it all. If you don’t want it then let me know and I’ll make sure that you don’t get pestered with it!
There you have it
This is not an exhaustive list and it’s as light on the technical shennanigans as possible. One of the reasons you’re thinking of hiring me is because those technical things are outside your wheelhouse or they bore the pants off you!
You get all of this baked into your site build. 👍🏽
*** a small caveat ***
I don’t offer Care Packages for sites I don’t build that are on random servers…
There are so many environmental and systemic variables from server to server and host to host that it would be impossible for me to completely understand each and every one of them out there in the off chance that you have a site on one that you want me to look after.
How much does that cost, Jack?
Since all of this will be baked into the total cost of your site, the payments for which are spread over 12, 24 or 36 months (read more about that here), for the duration of the payment plan you literally don’t even have to care!
However, at the end of the payment plan, when the site’s all bought and paid for, one of 2 things will happen with the baked in care package:
1 - Since you've finished paying for the site, the services come to an end...
The site is bundled up and handed over to you to take wherever you want.
This means that you will need to source new hosting, manage your domain name and email, setup your SSL certificate and ensure all plugins and the core are maintained, the site is secure etc, buy licences for all the plugins and themes on the site and on and on…
All the things I was doing for you are now your responsibility. 🥺
2 - You take out a new monthly care package.
This may actually work to your financial advantage. 👍🏽
Since you’ve paid off the total cost of the site, the cost of the Care Package going forward will be the total cost of all the licenses for plugins and themes plus the hosting broken down into monthly payments plus 1 hour of my time for tweaks/updates.
This may end up being less that what you were paying to pay off the site!
Your new Care Package will ensure that you have uninterrupted service; your site is where it’s comfy, all your tech needs are taken care of and you can keep on doing your thing! 😎
ready to get going?
Drop some basic info in the form below and I’ll be in touch as soon as I can to discuss your site with you.