Who Maintains Your Website After It Launches?

A website is not a thing you buy once. It is a thing that runs, and running things need occasional attention. Most businesses here find that out around eighteen months in, usually on the day the site stops working.

What actually needs doing

Less than you might fear, but not nothing.

Renewals. The domain and the SSL certificate both expire. A lapsed domain can be bought by someone else. An expired certificate makes browsers show a full-page warning, which does more damage in a day than most outages.

Security patches. Your site is built on components maintained by other people, and those get security fixes. Applying them is routine. Not applying them is how sites end up serving spam or redirecting visitors somewhere else.

Backups that have been tested. A backup nobody has restored is a hope. Once a year, restore one somewhere and confirm it works.

Monitoring. Something that tells a person when the site is down. Otherwise you find out from a customer, which is both slower and more embarrassing.

Content. Hours, prices, staff, the year in the footer. Small, and the most visible when neglected.

The three arrangements

Your developer holds a retainer. Simplest. They know the site, they patch it, you have someone to call. Costs a monthly fee whether or not anything happens, which is the nature of insurance.

You handle content, they handle the technical parts. Usually the best value. Your staff update text and prices through the CMS; the developer covers patches, backups and hosting. Requires that the site was built so non-technical staff can edit it, which is worth insisting on when you commission it.

Nobody, until something breaks. Common, and it works right up until it does not. The cost is that emergency work is more expensive, slower to arrange, and arrives at whatever moment is worst for you.

What to settle before launch

Ask these while you still have the vendor's attention.

Who renews the domain, and is it registered in my company's name? Who holds the hosting account? What is the response time when something breaks, and does that differ at a weekend? Can my staff update content without you? What is not covered by the maintenance fee?

The domain question is the one that causes the most trouble later. If it is registered in your developer's name, moving away from them is a favour they grant rather than a decision you make.

A reasonable expectation

Small updates within a few days. Something broken, same day during working hours. Security patches applied without you asking. A backup you could actually restore from.

Ours start from NPR 8,000 a month covering hosting, SSL, backups, patches, uptime monitoring and minor content edits, with no lock-in contract. Whether you use us or anyone else, the arrangement should be written down before launch, because the moment you need it is a bad moment to negotiate it.

The cheapest version

If a monthly fee is genuinely out of reach, do these four yourself. Put the domain and hosting renewals in a calendar with a reminder a month ahead. Register everything in your own name. Ask your developer to show one staff member how to update content. And once a year, pay someone for an hour to apply security updates.

That is not as good as a maintenance arrangement, and it is considerably better than nothing.