Article · Halo
What “website care” and hosting should include (in plain English)
Hosting is where files live. Care is what keeps the site fast, backed up, and recoverable when something breaks.
Hosting: the foundation
Hosting provides compute, storage, bandwidth, TLS certificates, and the network path between your domain and visitors. Good hosting pairs modern HTTP defaults with monitoring that tells you when something degrades—not after customers complain.
We prefer configurations where staging exists when needed, SSH or deploy hooks are documented, and you are not locked into a proprietary page builder you cannot export.
Care: keeping the machine healthy
Care plans cover updates for CMS cores and plugins where applicable, compatibility checks after updates, and rollback paths when a release misbehaves. They also include backup verification—testing restores periodically instead of assuming snapshots work.
Uptime checks and simple alerting catch certificate expiry, DNS drift, and sudden 500 errors. The goal is predictable recovery time, not guaranteed perfection.
What is usually out of scope
Major redesigns, new feature development, and copywriting campaigns are separate from baseline care—though we can bundle them on a roadmap. Care is about stability and small fixes; projects are about net-new value.
Ownership and access
You should have admin access to DNS, hosting, analytics, and domain registration. If credentials live in one employee’s inbox, bus factor risk is real. We hand off documentation at launch and refresh it when stacks change.
Picking the right tier
Static marketing sites need less hands-on time than commerce or member portals. We right-size retainers to how often you publish, how complex the stack is, and what uptime promises you make to your own clients.