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 SaaS website (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 point 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 SaaS support services are.
I’ve written loads of articles on the cons of these systems, here’s a few:
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 WordCamp 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:
- Website Management vs Hosting
- Switching hosting to a budget provider
- Why our Website Hosting and Management is the best in Wagga
- 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.
