Hi there, you have most likely landed on this page to get more information on what that ‘Monthly Fee’ is all about. Some of our documentation also refer to it as a ‘Retainer’. Note this also applies to our legacy ‘Business Cloud Hosting’ and ‘Annual Maintenance’ yearly fees.
So what is it?
Put simply, it is a fee we charge you each month (or per year) to keep your website running smoothly.
What doesn’t the monthly maintenance fee cover?
Let’s get this one out of the way first.
Content Creation and Updates
One word here or there is fine, we never charge for 5 minute jobs. New pages, posts, images, video and any other forms of content creation and adjustments are charged at our hourly rate and are not covered under monthly maintenance.
Open Source
Your website will have been built with ‘Open Source Code’ most likely in WordPress. ‘Open Source’ means the source code has been made available to you for FREE.
Plug Ins
Additionally we will have used third party plug-ins for extra functionality. In most cases these will operate for the life of your website and we can go in and tweak them as needed under our monthly maintenance fee arrangement. Plug-ins do reach their end of life for various reasons. A classic example is when the plugin developer no longer operates their business. If your plug-ins stop working we will assess the situation and give you an estimate of costs involved to get it back in shape. In most cases this is a 5 minute tweak and you are back on your way – no extra charge. However in some cases such as having to install a new plugin additional charges may apply. Some plugins also require a monthly or yearly subscription.
Please note this applies to plugins we (Image Direct) have installed on your website. If transferring a website to us built by another developer we will do our best to keep your website functional but cannot be held responsible for the technology another developer has used to build your website.
Ok so what does the Monthly Maintenance Fee cover?
Hosting
Hosting of your website if you choose to host with us. 98% of all our website clients choose to host with us. Why? We maintain a low contention ratio for our hosting that aims to provide high performance and user-engagement when compared with the most common commodity shared hosting plans that we see offered in the marketplace.
The PHP memory limits for our hosting is 512 MB – This ensures your site will function well under increased load and/or site complexity.
We provide for up to 5 subdomains and unlimited alias domains are allowed.
Emails
Email hosting (Australian Based). Assistance with set up and hosting of your email OR routing your email to your current provider as well as various requests around email hosting e.g I can’t connect email to my new iPhone; can you send me instructions on how to do that? OR ‘please set up a new email address for xyz person and send through the new credentials’.
Help, I’m stuck ‘Fair support policy’
We never charge for a 5 minute ‘help I’m stuck’ phone call in the first 6 months. In reality, this ends up being for the life of the website while it is under our monthly maintenance fee.
5 minute fixes are rarely charged for but if we were to get 5 phone calls in one day for the same fix, we would suggest a paid training session at your convenience.
Essential security updates
‘Essential’ is the keyword here. Our technical team will only proceed with updates that have been given the all clear by WordPress, Google and other reference authorities such as W3. This means that sometimes you will log into the backend of your site and see messages to ‘update’ or ‘upgrade’. Rest assured our systems monitor these and we only take action when it is safe to do so.
First Month is usually FREE
In most cases you won’t get your first monthly maintenance invoice until 8-10 weeks after the website goes live. It’s an exciting time to finally have a website that actually works and so it can be a surprise to ‘get an invoice out of the blue’ a month or so later. Please check in with us if you need further explanation.
Specific Google stuff
- Maintenance of your Google Analytics account.
- Maintenance of your Google My Business listing if you choose to have one.
- Google Tag Manager: Maintaining and upgrading when and where needed.
General Internet Stuff
- Monitoring of site reachability and checks for expected content.
- Early resolution of minor web app errors that trigger our monitoring systems, e.g. due to code updates or deprecation. This is done on an event-basis, and is typically invisible to you the client.
- Auditing and early patching of known plugin/core vulnerabilities as they are publicly revealed (before they become actively mass-exploited against web apps).
- Point-in-time rolling backups to secured cold storage for a period of at least 45 days.
- Regular signature-based malware scans against the web app filesystem.
- Browser Compatibility. We build websites to be compatible with the current version (as of web build finish date) of Google Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari less one version. The monthly maintenance fee ensures this continues over the life of the website.
- Lifetime of website. As long as you are paying the monthly fee we will do our best to maintain your website at ‘day of delivery status’. This means maintaining its look and feel, form and function as it was on the the day it went live. Note however that technology can change at a rapid rate and upstream and downstream providers can stop support without notice. In most cases you should expect your website to last a minimum of 2 years (24 months) as long as the monthly fee is paid.
Very Important please note:
It’s really, really, really important to point out that if you choose NOT to host with us it means two very important things:
One: We will need to check the hosting where your website will be living PRIOR to starting your website project and there could be a slight chance we can’t build and install there.
Two: It does NOT change our monthly fee.
Third Party Access
Giving access to your website to other IT Professionals may forfeit our ability to support your website and/or be held by the terms laid out on this page.
What about Shopify?
We also build and support Shopify websites. Technical Support, updates and hosting is covered by the Shopify subscription that has been selected for your project and is paid directly to Shopify. We are still here for you for support and we encourage you to always call us first. In some cases, after assessment, we may have to escalate the ticket to Shopify support.
Life of a website: All our websites are built and serviced* with the expectation that the website will function in the same way it did when it went LIVE for a full 24 months. In many cases the website will continue to function and operate in the same way it did at GO LIVE for more than 24 months however you should NOT expect this to be the case and plan to need a new website 2 years (24 months) after the GO LIVE date. *Only where you are paying our monthly maintenance fee.
Fee Price Levels
At all times we endeavour to keep your monthly maintenance fee to a minimum and in many cases you may notice it remain the same throughout the life of your website. (see above for more information about life of website). Upstream costs do, from time to time, get passed down to us and we will absorb as much as we can, however on some occasions we may have no option but to review your monthly maintenance fee. Any price increases equaling to or less than the CPI rate for Australia may be passed on unannounced. Any price increase above the CPI will be communicated with you prior wherever possible.
