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maintenance & hosting
We host it ourselves,
so we can actually fix it.
Most agencies resell someone else's hosting. When your site goes down they open a ticket and relay the answers back to you. We run our own servers, so the people who built your site can read the logs, find the cause and fix it. Every rebuild package includes the first year of hosting, SSL and monitoring.
Australian hosting · Updates on staging first · Backups off the server · Monitoring that alerts a human.
what a care plan should mean
Most "maintenance" is
a subscription to nothing.
The web industry sells a lot of care plans that consist of pressing "update all" once a month and emailing you a PDF about it. Below is the honest list of what maintenance involves. Use it on us, and on anyone else quoting you.
Updates on a copy first
Core, theme and plugin updates applied to a staging copy, checked, then promoted to live. Updating the live site directly and hoping is the single most common cause of "my website disappeared this morning".
Backups you've actually restored
A backup nobody has ever restored is a guess, not a backup. Copies live off the server, and they get test-restored, because the day you need one is the worst possible day to discover it was writing zero bytes.
Monitoring that wakes someone
Checked from outside the network, on a schedule, alerting a person. A dashboard nobody looks at is not monitoring, and "the site's been down since Friday" is a customer's job to notice only if nobody else is doing it.
website hosting australia
Australian hosting,
run by the people who built it.
Hosting is where most website problems actually live. A slow WordPress site is usually an oversold shared server, a cache nobody configured or a PHP version three releases behind, none of which a developer working only in the dashboard can see or fix.
Onshore, and close to your customers
Servers in Australia, so requests from Australian visitors aren't crossing an ocean twice before your page starts rendering. It matters more if you handle personal or health information and want data held onshore.
Tuned, not just rented
Current PHP, caching configured for your actual site rather than a default, SSL renewed automatically, and HTTP security headers set. These are the parts that separate a fast site from a slow one on identical hardware.
Included for the first year
Every rebuild package includes the first year of hosting, SSL and monitoring, and the build packages include hosting, security and support. After that you can stay on a care plan with us or take the site anywhere. See what each package includes.
Never locked in
You own the code, the domain and the hosting. If you want to leave, you get a full export and we help you move it. A host that makes leaving difficult is telling you something about how it plans to keep you.
taking over an existing site
We check what's there
before we promise anything.
If we didn't build your site, an ongoing plan starts with finding out what we'd be taking responsibility for. You get the assessment whether or not you continue with us, and it will say plainly if the site needs remediation before a maintenance plan makes any sense.
- 01
What's running
PHP and WordPress versions, every plugin and theme with its update status and whether it's still maintained by anyone, plus licences you're paying for and licences that quietly lapsed.
- 02
What's protecting it
Whether backups exist, where they live, and whether they can actually be restored. Whether SSL renews on its own. Whether anything is present in the files that shouldn't be.
- 03
Who controls it
Domain registrant, DNS, hosting account and site logins. This is the part people skip, and it's the one that matters most if a previous developer stops answering. Why the registrant name matters.
- 04
What it would take
A straight list: what needs doing now, what can wait, and what it costs. If the honest answer is that rebuilding beats maintaining, we'll say that instead of selling you a plan. What a rebuild costs.
why this is credible
We run this for
ourselves first.
We're the web studio inside Alien IT Solutions, and we operate a live estate of our own: WordPress and WooCommerce sites, hand-built Next.js builds, self-hosted servers, uptime and performance monitoring, automation, and IoT devices reporting into dashboards we wrote. The maintenance and hosting we sell is the same thing we depend on daily. That's a different proposition from an agency reselling a hosting plan with a markup.
- Hosting
- Backups
- Monitoring
- Security
- Updates
- SSL
- DNS
- Support
good to know
Maintenance questions.
What does WordPress maintenance actually include?
Done properly, five things: core, theme and plugin updates applied on staging before live; backups taken off the server and periodically test-restored; uptime and performance monitoring that alerts a person; SSL renewal and security hardening; and a record of what changed and when. If a care plan doesn't describe those five, it's a retainer rather than maintenance.
Do I need hosting in Australia?
For an Australian audience it helps, because distance adds delay to every request and that shows in load times. It matters more if you handle personal or health information and want data onshore. It matters less if a good CDN is already caching pages close to visitors. Honestly: server location is one factor among several, and a badly configured Australian server still loses to a well configured overseas one.
Is hosting included when you build my site?
Every rebuild package includes the first year of hosting, SSL and monitoring, and the build packages include hosting, security and support, confirmed in your written quote. After that you can move to a care plan with us or take the site to any host you like. You own the code, the domain and the hosting either way.
How often should a WordPress site be updated?
Security releases within days, because published vulnerabilities get scanned for automatically and an unpatched site is found by a bot, not a person. Routine plugin and theme updates suit a monthly cycle on staging first. The real risk isn't that updates break sites, it's that a site left for a year accumulates so many overdue updates they can't be applied one at a time any more.
Can you maintain a site you didn't build?
Yes. It starts with the audit above, and you get that assessment before committing to anything ongoing. If the site needs remediation work first, we'll tell you what and why before quoting a plan.
What happens if my site goes down?
Monitoring checks from outside and alerts us rather than waiting for you to notice. Because we run the servers, the same team that gets the alert can read the logs and fix the cause, instead of raising a ticket with a hosting company on your behalf and relaying the replies.
What does a care plan cost?
It depends on what the site is and what shape it's in, which is why the audit comes first. Tell us the address and we'll come back with a fixed number and exactly what it covers. Ongoing SEO is priced separately and published openly, from $390 +GST a month with no lock-in.
Send us the address and we'll tell you what we find. Ask about a care plan →