Your website is live. Who’s looking after it?

Your website is paid for. It is online. It looks good. So why keep paying every month? It is one of the fairest questions we get, and it deserves a real answer, not a sales pitch.

What happens to a website left on its own

A website is not a sign you screw onto a wall. It is software running on a server, connected to the internet, twenty-four hours a day. And like any machine that is always on, it wears down when nobody looks after it.

Here is, in order, what we see happen to an abandoned website:

• The security certificate expires. Three to twelve months. The browser then shows a big red warning: “This site is not secure”. One customer in two closes the tab.
• The domain name expires. A reminder lands in an inbox nobody checks, and the site disappears overnight. Worse: someone else can buy your address.
• The information goes out of date. A new number, a service you no longer offer, hours that changed. The customer calls into the void and assumes you closed.
• Nobody notices the site is down. That is the worst case. A site offline for three weeks, discovered by chance because a customer finally mentioned it on the phone.

What you are actually paying for

It is not disk space. Gigabytes are worth next to nothing, and any company selling you gigabytes is selling you the wrong thing.

What you pay for is someone staying responsible for your website:

• Monitoring. We are alerted when the site goes down, often before you are. We fix it without you having to call.
• Automatic backups. If something breaks, we put back yesterday’s version. Without a backup, rebuilding a lost site costs as much as a new one.
• The certificate and the domain. Renewed before they expire, without you having to think about it once.
• Your changes. A price that changes, a photo to replace, a number to correct: you write, it is done. Time for changes is included every year starting with the Mail plan.
• Someone to call. That is probably the real part. When something is off with your site, you do not have to find out who built it or hope they still answer.

The honest question: is it mandatory?

No. And we want to say it clearly, because many agencies let people believe otherwise.

Your website belongs to you as soon as it is paid for. With us, the first year of Web Care is included with the site. After that, we hand you the files if you want them, the domain is in your name, and you are free to host it wherever you like: with a five-dollar-a-month host, or with your nephew who knows his stuff. That is entirely your right.

What you lose then is not the site: it is the person who looks after it. It is up to you to judge whether you have time to watch a certificate, renew a domain and fix a page that stopped loading on a stormy Tuesday morning.

The math to do

Ask yourself a single question: what is an average contract worth in your trade?

If your website is offline for a week and you miss just one customer during that time, you have lost more than website care costs you for the year. And unlike your other expenses, you never see this one go by, because a customer who cannot find you does not call to tell you so.

At ganolyk, the first year of Web Care is included with every website, hosted in Montréal. After that, it starts at $29 a month, on a twelve-month contract. Never a condition for keeping your website. See the four plans.