Website Maintenance in Murray, Kentucky

Managed hosting on our own servers, an SSL certificate that renews automatically, daily backups with 30-day retention, software and plugin updates, security patching, malware scanning and a firewall, uptime monitoring, page caching, and content changes each month. Content changes means the ordinary things a business actually needs: new hours, a new staff member, a price update, a seasonal promotion, swapping a photo, adding a testimonial, correcting a typo. Email or call and it gets done, usually the same business day. It also includes a local phone number that reaches somebody who knows your specific site, which is the part that is impossible to get from a hosting company.

Ask it a different way: is your website software? Because it is. WordPress, its plugins, the PHP it runs on, the web server, and the operating system underneath are all software, and all of them ship security fixes regularly. Software that stops getting updated does not stay where it was, it becomes progressively more exposed, because every published fix is also a published description of the hole it closes. Attacks on small business sites are automated and indiscriminate; nothing is targeting you personally, it is scanning the whole internet for known unpatched versions. The maintenance is not a subscription to keep something running. It is the reason it keeps running.

It follows a predictable path. In the first few months nothing visible changes, which is exactly why the problem is easy to ignore. Around six months to a year, plugins fall behind and small things break quietly, most commonly the contact form, which fails without telling anybody while months of inquiries disappear. Somewhere in the second year the PHP version the site runs on reaches end of life and the host forces an upgrade the outdated code cannot survive. Meanwhile an unpatched plugin gets exploited, usually not to deface the site but to quietly inject spam links or serve malware, which is worse because you do not notice. Then browsers flag the site as dangerous, search engines drop it, and the cleanup costs several times what maintenance would have.

Yes, and a large share of the sites we maintain came from somewhere else. The process is straightforward: we review what you have, migrate it onto our servers, bring the software up to date, install SSL if it is missing, get backups and monitoring running, clean up anything already compromised, and then it is on the plan like anything else. Migration is free. The one thing we check first is who controls your domain name, because that is the piece people most often cannot account for. If the site turns out to be on a proprietary platform we cannot access, or is so out of date that patching it is not realistic, we will tell you that honestly rather than take a monthly fee for something we cannot actually protect.

Included: text edits, hours, staff additions and removals, prices, photos, testimonials, adding a blog post or news item you have written, seasonal promotions, updating a service description, and event pages. Also included are the small technical things people worry about asking for, like fixing a broken link or adjusting a form field. Not included: a new page design from scratch every month, a full redesign, new custom functionality, e-commerce product catalogs, integrations with other software, and original copywriting or photography. Those are quoted separately as projects. In practice almost nothing a normal small business asks for in a given month falls outside the plan, and when something does, we tell you before doing it rather than after.

Uptime monitoring checks your site continuously, so for an outage we usually know before you do and are already working on it. For requests you send us, ordinary content changes are typically done the same business day. Anything actually broken, meaning the site is down, a form has stopped delivering, or something looks wrong to visitors, jumps the queue. We are in Murray on Central time and we answer our own phone at (270) 807-1000. That is the real difference between a care plan and cheap hosting: not the servers, but whether a person who knows your specific site picks up.

Hosting is the server your site sits on. A care plan is somebody actually looking after what is on it. Plenty of hosting is genuinely cheap, five to fifteen dollars a month, and for that you get disk space and a promise that the machine will mostly stay powered on. Nobody updates your software, nobody notices if your form stops sending, nobody tests whether the backup could actually be restored, and nobody makes the change you emailed about. Our $49 plan includes the hosting, so it is not an add-on charge on top of a hosting bill; it is one line that covers the server and the person. If you only want the server side, our managed web hosting page covers that separately.

Taken daily, retained 30 days, kept off the web server, and periodically restored to verify they work. That last part is the one that gets skipped everywhere and it is the only part that matters at the moment you need it. A backup that has never been restored is a hopeful assumption, not a recovery plan. The common failure modes are real: backups that silently stopped running months ago, backups stored on the same server that just got compromised, and database backups that turn out to be incomplete. We would rather find that out on a Tuesday during a test than on the morning your site is gone.

Month to month, cancel whenever you want, and if you leave you keep your website. The domain is registered in your name, the files and the database are yours, and we will hand over a full copy along with the logins and help the next person get set up. We do not build on a locked platform only we can touch and we do not hold a site hostage to retain a customer. That is deliberate, because the moment a company needs a contract to keep you, the relationship has already gone wrong. It also means we have to be worth $49 a month every month, which is the correct amount of pressure for us to be under.

The $49 plan covers a normal business site, which is most of what we host. Online stores, membership sites, high-traffic sites, and custom applications need more: more frequent backups, staging environments for testing updates before they go live, payment and PCI considerations, more resources on the server, and considerably more monitoring. Those are quoted individually after we look at what the site actually does, because pricing them from a web page would be guessing. Call us and describe it and we will give you a real number rather than a range.