Yah, your website if finally launched! Now your done … it will take care of itself, right? WRONG! Now it’s time to think about hosting and maintaining your beloved new baby.
If you’re exploring building a website and needing hosting/maintenance, you’ve probably realized that it can be a complicated and overwhelming process.
Here is what I provide with my hosting and website maintenance services ALL FOR ONLY $25 PER MONTH:
- Professional hosting through my servers – Value $10/month
- Nightly backups – Value $10/month
- SSL Certificate to secure your website (HTTPS, Domain Validated) – Value $15
- 3 email accounts – 2 GB email storage total – Value $15/month
- Free annual domain registration – Value $15/ year
- Set up Google analytics – Value $55 set up fee
- Create XML sitemap with automatic website submissions to search engines – Value $25 set up fee
- Theme, plugin and extension updates. – Value varies (depending on complexity of changes) *see below for explanation
- Access to website (WordPress) dashboard to make changes to website on your own
*Why is it important to update your website?
Websites are like any other software application you may use, Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, etc., in that they have versions, each new version adds features, or fixes security flaws. This is also the same as if you are updating your iPhone. If you don’t upgrade your website then you can’t take advantage of new features and hackers could possibly gain access to your website through some “backdoor”. This is why it’s always advisable to keep your website version up-to-date.
In addition, once a new plugin is installed, the website should be checked to see if the new plugin “broke” any website feature. Sometimes plugins that worked well together previously are not compatible when upgraded.
Yes, you can do the theme and plugin updates direct from your WordPress dashboard with one click all by yourself, BUT the updated plugin may or may not be compatible with the theme update and could potentially crash or break your website.
Here is an overview of my process for doing these upgrades:
- Make a website backup (so I can always revert, if needed)
- Make a working duplicate of the website on another server (so I don’t work on the live site)
- Perform the upgrade(s) on the duplicate
- Test and make sure nothing breaks
- Move the new upgraded website to the live website’s server and replace the older version (still keeping that backup)
- Test again 🙂 (because you always need to test again)
This is to ensure there is no interruption to your website and that everything still operates the way it was originally intended.
