Website Hosting & Basic Maintenance Plan

Your website is hosted on a fast, secure VPS server from Dreamhost.

SSL provides an encrypted link between the server and browser. Your site will default to https instead of http, and you will see a small 🔒 lock icon at the top of your browser next to the url box. This gives your site more credibility online, and allows your website visitors to submit their personal information with confidence. Good for SEO too! You can learn more about SSL here.

Routine updates to WordPress and all plugins to ensure good performance and security.

Database and all website files are automatically backed up monthly (should we ever need to rollback to a previous version).

As a courtesy service to all our website hosting clients, I provide up to one hour of small content updates each month. ‘Content’ refers to text and images seen on the site pages.

In order to deliver a wide range of options and enhanced security, your site will include licences for premium themes and plugins. This ensures that software used on your website is actively supported by its developer, and will receive routine updates for security vulnerabilities. Your site will include licences to the Divi Theme (for design flexibility), and Ninja Forms (for easily managing your ‘Contact Us’ and lead capture forms).

Your website will need to send out various emails to potential leads and customers. This could be simple confirmation emails, shipping notifications, payments received, refund notifications, etc. When these notification emails land in your customers’ inboxes, it’s important to ensure that they are coming from reliable and trusted mail servers. This helps to make sure that emails are landing in your customers’ inbox, and not in their spam folders.

SendGrid is one of the leading transactional email services, sending over 35 billion emails every month. They allow your website to send up to 100 free emails per day. Note: This all happens in the background. Customers will see emails coming directly from you. They will not see any SendGrid branding.

Any requests outside of the services outlined above will be considered ‘out of scope’ and charged at an hourly rate of $55.00/hr, and billed in quarter-hour increments. Examples of services that would be considered ‘out of scope’ include:

• Design changes to page structure/layout
• Adding new plugins/functionality (eg ‘Sign up to our Newsletter’ or ‘Blog’)
• Creating new pages (landing pages, seasonal promo pages, etc)

You will have the opportunity to review and approve any additional fees prior to moving forward. Additional hours will be reflected as a line item on the next invoice.

I do not provide inbox/email hosting as part of your website hosting plan. If you require branded email addresses (eg ‘info@yourcompany.com’), you will need
professional email hosting on reliable email servers with zero downtime.

We recommend Google Workspace (formerly ‘GSuite’), Google’s cloud software suite for businesses. Google Workspace includes Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and 30GB of Google Drive cloud storage. Learn More.

Setup involves:

• Initial signup and configuration of Google Workspace
• Routing your mail servers to Google
• Setup of primary email account ‘info@yourcompany.com’ and up to 3 alias accounts (eg. ‘billing@yourcompany.com’)

Initial setup/configuration costs a one-time fee of $110, and then $6/month/account (paid directly to Google).

All server-side maintenance will be done by us, including management of all default and custom DNS records (used for connecting your domain to external services such as Gmail). cPanel access will not be provided at any time. FTP and database access may be granted in some cases.

If you are transferring your website to another hosting provider, I will provide you with everything required including:

• Full backups of your website files and database
• Full list of custom DNS records used on your site (used for connecting your domain to external services such as Gmail)
• Credentials for any third party accounts/services used to run your website

Note: Any additional communications effort required to transfer your site may be considered ‘out of scope’ and may be billed at $55/hour.

Please note that if you choose to transfer your website to another hosting provider, any premium (paid) Themes or Plugins that are included in your site will no longer receive updates until you (or your new web hosting provider) purchases them again.