Website Hosting and Maintenance

You don’t, you are very welcome to manage your website on your own. But you do need to log into your site every week and make sure you keep it updated. Most small businesses don’t have time for that, which is why we offer it, along with a bunch of other things.

WordPress accounts for a huge proportion of the internet, which makes it a good target for hacking. The main way WordPress websites get hacked is through non-updated plugins.

We are happy to teach you how to look after your own site, but if you don’t want to do it yourself we can do it for you.

We do highly recommend that you have really good quality hosting and choose a company with good support. You can’t go wrong with Conetix.

For the most part, no. There are a couple of hosts we are willing to work with such as WPEngine. However, most of the time it is much harder for us to monitor security and keep websites running as fast as we’d like, on another host. But the great news, is that we’ll move your site to our servers for you if you’d like us to host and manage your WordPress website.

We have a couple of different prices depending on the size of your website, how much traffic you have, and the complexity of your site (for example a membership site takes more time for us to maintain the backend of the site).

For a small business website with 5-10 pages and no extra complexity, our plans are $82.50 inc GST per month. If you have a more complicated website or need extra storage you will be looking at around $121 inc GST per month, or if you need more, we can customise a package based on your needs. .

Have a chat with us and we can clarify which plan you would be on if you choose to have us host and maintain your website.

We will look after the day-to-day maintenance of your website. This includes:

• Australian premium hosting
• Security settings (including SSL certificate) confirmed and maintained
• Security monitoring of your site
• Daily backups, which are kept for 1 month
• Unlimited rollbacks to one of those backups if needed
• Weekly theme and plugin updates (update performed within 24 hours if there is a security patch)
• Access to a number of premium plugins, including form, spam filter, cache, and more.
• Two hours of technical support to use throughout the year, this can be used for site changes, training videos, or other technical support for your site. These are counted up in 15-minute blocks.

We have aimed to make our backend maintenance as comprehensive as possible while not making you pay for things you may not need or want. So these are a few things that are not included in the package. You can ask for us to include them for an additional price or pay for us to do them separately.

• Additional site changes can come out of your 2 hours per year, but once you have used that time up, you will need to purchase additional time for us to keep making changes for you. If you’d prefer to have a dedicated amount of time each month, we can add this to your maintenance plan at a discounted rate. Let’s chat and work out what you need.
• Changing to a new plugin – if your site uses a plugin that becomes abandoned (no longer supported or given updates) it will take time for us to integrate the new plugin, this will be an additional cost.
• If a major release of a plugin, theme, or WordPress causes issues that break functionality on your website, this will need to be repaired. This time is not included in your maintenance package. We will let you know if this happens and will give you a quote for the amount of time required to fix the issue.
• If there is a conflict between two of your plugins, the time required to fix this will be in addition to your package and charged at our hourly rate.
• While we do our very best to keep your site secure, there is always a risk of getting hacked. If your website gets hacked and we are unable to use one of your 30-day backups to restore to, the cost of having your site cleaned professionally will be an additional cost.
• Emails – there are a few fabulous email options out there, including Google Apps and Office 365. We highly recommend these. It’s not a great idea to have your emails on your web server, as it becomes a security risk, so we have chosen not to offer it as an option with our hosting. If you have questions about this, let us know. If you need help getting your email set up, we can help you with that for an additional cost.

If you’re wondering about something specific, get in touch, and we can let you know if it’s included or not.

After working with lots of different web hosts over more than 10 years, we have found that not all hosts are the same!! And we firmly believe the slightly higher price we pay for hosting comes back 10-fold due to quality and support.

Here are a few reasons we love Conetix and plan to host with them long into the future:

• Australian-based servers (gives you extra speed and a slight SEO bump)
• Fully carbon offset servers
• They don’t overload their servers (part of what makes cheaper hosting so slow)
• Really secure server settings
• Local Australian support team
• Super helpful and friendly team

Technical support is any help you need on your website. So if you can’t remember how to do something on your site, get in touch and we will either fix it for you or make a training video, so next time you can just watch that again and do it yourself. 

It also includes if something looks like its not quite right. If we have built your site and something looks like it isn’t functioning properly, let us know and we’ll take a look. For most cases, we will fix it without using up any of your 2 hours of included support. If you have a site with a lot of complexity and an update changes the way a plugin interacts with your website we will need to charge for these changes. But get in touch and we’ll let you know which category it fits into before we do any work. 

You don’t, but they work better, have more security built-in and make your website a better experience for your end-user. When we pay a plugin developer for their work, they are more invested in keeping that plugin secure, updated, and adding new features. When you choose to use free plugins, the downside is the developer might give up and stop supporting the plugin. We’d prefer to pay them for their work and know we’re getting a quality product.

We offer both options, however, if you choose to pay monthly you will need to go onto an automated credit card payment and there is a fee that covers our automated payment fees to Stripe.

So paying annually will save you about 10%.

When we start a hosting and maintenance contract with you, it will have an end date on the invoice. As we approach the end of the contract either party can choose not to start a new contract. We aim to let you know at the start of the month before the end of your contract if we are offering you a new contract.

We ask that you give us 2 weeks’ notice if you’re planning to move your site elsewhere so we can prepare your website files for you. If we are not going to offer you a new contract, we will also give you two weeks notice to allow you time to find a new host.

Moving onto a new host is easy, and if you choose to stay with Conetix (the same host that your site is hosted with through us), but on your own hosting account, the process will be as painless as possible. You just call them and arrange an account, and they will work with us to move your site to your own account (you won’t have to do a thing). If you choose to host elsewhere, we will package up your site so you can move it to your new host. 

You can read more in our terms and conditions.