The Case for Bundled Professional Website Hosting & Maintenance

Many clients think web hosting is the same as web maintenance. In reality, they are two very different, equally important things. Think of web hosting as your physical house. It’s where you live and keep all your vital stuff (for a website, that’s files, images, and the code that makes it work).

Now think of maintenance as the doors, locks, and the security system that protects your house. Because open source software is constantly evolving, proactive ongoing maintenance is needed to ensure that the security system stays just as effective as the day it was installed.

What would be the cost of your website going down even for a short time? Or if it were to be found to be distributing malicious code to your prospective customers? Do you like the peace of mind knowing your “house” and everything inside it is safe and secure? If so, you should probably have a maintenance package.

Our experience has shown us that we can best serve our clients by bundling hosting and maintenance together. In each of our professional hosting + maintenance packages, we proactively manage your site, with testing and deployment of WordPress core and plug-ins on an ongoing basis. Automated daily backups assure a quick restoration should it be needed. With automatic deployment of WordPress core security patches and 24 x 7 monitoring for suspicious file activity, you can rest assured you are safe and protected.

But would my website ever be a target?

You might think hackers don’t care about you and your business. But anyone can be hacked, and rarely are people seeking you out specifically—they’re running automated scanning tools that look for any website that hasn’t been maintained and is easy to get into. According to Forbes and Sophos Labs, 30,000 sites a day are found to be unwittingly distributing malicious code for the cyber criminals, and those can include everything from personal blogs, to small business websites, to large news sites. Let’s look at some numbers.

• 50-60% is WordPress’ share of the global CMS market – making it the most popular CMS of them all.
• New York Observer, New York Post, TED, Thought Catalog, Williams, USA Today, CNN, Fortune.com, TIME.com,National Post, Spotify, TechCrunch, CBS Local, NBC all use WordPress.
• Only 22% of WordPress sites are running on the latest version of WordPress.
• Major versions of WordPress get released every 152 days on the average.

How do you help prevent hacking?

As the saying goes, the best offense is a good defense. With our professional hosting + maintenance packages, we proactively manage your site. You will get automated daily back-ups. You will get proactive, ongoing testing and deployment of WP core and plug-ins. We will keep your site up-to-date with the latest security measures, so you can rest assured you are safe and protected.

Security guaranteed.

We include a no-hack guarantee for all WordPress sites on a hosting + maintenance package on our WP Engine server. In the highly unlikely event your site gets hacked, we will fix your site at no cost to you.

In Conclusion, Why Website Hosting & Maintenance Matters

Also Known As: May You Never Feel the Agony of Having Your Website Hacked

Keeping your site’s software up-to-date is the number one thing you can do to mitigate security risks, and downtime. What would the business cost be of having your website hacked, or not knowing that critical functionality was broken — think of your contact form, or your checkout process. A hosting and maintenance plan is like having insurance for your website. We’re so confident that it won’t get hacked when on our combination of secure hosting and proactive maintenance, that we offer a no-hack guarantee. In the unlikely event that the site were to get compromised, we keep daily backups and can restore it to it’s full functioning glory within minutes of alert, minimizing downtime. Our team’s proven process makes sure that all of the latest updates to the CMS platform and plugins are applied to your website on an ongoing basis, and also QA’ing key functionality after each major update. For more information, read this article about professional hosting & maintenance packages, and why you need both hosting and maintenance to keep things running smoothly.

In addition to making technical updates, our packages flex to include as much help as you need for ongoing site engagement optimization, digital marketing needs, and helping to manage content updates to your website. Have a laundry list of changes you’d like to make? Let us do them for you so you can focus on what you do best.

Contact us to learn more about our customizable ongoing security, maintenance and hosting plans.