Website care: backups, security, monitoring and server administration

Hardening against hacks, setting up backups and monitoring, and getting a server in order are one-off jobs with a timeline and a signed acceptance certificate. Maintenance is a monthly cycle that keeps the problems from coming back. The usual order is to get things in order once, then maintain them. We won't charge a monthly fee for watching over a mess — that would be paying for patience, not for work.

In how much has to be checked. In a store, the things that break cost money immediately: payments, the cart, shipping labels, product feeds — and they need checking daily. On a site without a store, failures are quiet: the contact form stops sending leads and the phone simply stays silent. That is why these are two separate pages with different scopes of work.

The hosting provider watches its own server, not your site: the server can be perfectly healthy while the store returns a blank page. Backups are the same — the question is not whether they exist, but where they are stored and whether anyone has ever restored from them. On one of our own projects we went seven months without knowing backups weren't being created, and only found out during a scheduled restore test.

You learn about it from monitoring, not from a customer. Whether to wake someone up at night is a decision made in advance: for a store with night-time orders and active ads the answer is usually yes, for a corporate site a message in the morning is enough. Out-of-hours response is a separate tier, and it is written into the contract.

It can, if you update blindly on the live site. So updates go onto a copy first and the modules are checked there, and when several versions behind, we move one step at a time. Sometimes it turns out a module doesn't work on the new version and its author no longer supports it — better to find that out on a copy than in a customer's cart.

No, and anyone who promises that is not telling the truth. We close what is known today and remove the predictable causes of outages: a full disk, expired certificates, unsupported versions. Tomorrow someone will find a new vulnerability in the platform or a module — which is why protection always comes with a backup that has been proven to restore.

That is a different task with a different order of work, and it isn't part of any service in this section. First you need to establish what was done, when, and whether traces remain — only then close the holes. We take an infected site into support only after it has been cleaned up separately. If we find foreign files during our review, we say so immediately and re-estimate the work.

Yes, but we will honestly split it in two: the first month clears the backlog, then comes the regular cycle. The free check shows how big the first part will be. Rolling both into a single monthly fee would be wrong: they are different amounts of work, and this way you can see what you are paying for.