What are the ongoing costs?
Once your website is live, there are no ongoing costs.
Be forewarned that once a website becomes stall (no updates), it slowly drops from Google’s graces so your page rank will drop significantly and then even with the greatest SEO efforts, it will take a considerable amount of time to bring your search rankings back up.
If you have a static HTML website and you only care that people see you have a website, this isn’t a big deal. However, if you are running a WordPress website or a shopping cart website of any kind, we strongly suggest you think twice and consider a Web Maintenance contract to keep your website content up-to-date and to ensure that WordPress, any plugins, and most importantly, all security updates are made on a monthly basis. Contact us if you would like to discuss this further.
In either case, websites really should be updated at some regular interval. Unfortunately, there are plenty of bad people out there who want to gain access to your website so they can use the resources for their own use. In most cases, they are not targeting your website personally, it’s just about accessing as much resource as they can or if you are running a shopping cart website, to obtain credit card and/or personal information. To prevent this type of thing from happening, its critical that WordPress, all plugins, and security updates are made in a timely fashion.
Domain Name
Your domain name (your-website.com), is usually paid annually directly to the domain name register. In many cases, this is a reoccurring charge on the credit card you used to secure the domain name. In most cases, the domain name register will send you an email a week or two before the domain name is about to expire. Don’t rely on this, mark it on your calendar. You will need to pay the the annual fee or forfeit the domain name. If you forfeit the domain name, the name goes up for auction.
Web Hosting – through our VPS
We offer client-only web hosting. You will receive an annual invoice for web hosting from us. Our servers are closely monitored. We take our client’s websites and the data contained therein very seriously. We employ every security measure possible to continually block out email spam and prevent server hacking attempts. We do daily and nightly backups to ensure that if your website goes down for any reason, we can quickly restore it. Please keep in mind that no website can be 100% secure as new vulnerabilities are exposed daily. If you hosting with us and something does go wrong, you’re website will be restored within minutes.
Web Hosting – Offsite
If you are hosted through another Web Hosting Company, the invoice interval depends on the contract you agreed to when signing up for Web Hosting, you invoice could be monthly, annually or every three years. This is paid directly to the Web Host not to us. You will need to contact the Web Host to find out what their protocol is for Website backups and restoring backups should the need arise.
Technical Support
At Abke Design, we take pride in our Customer Support. We work hard to build long lasting relationships with our clients. We have a high client retention ratio and are very proud to have many of the same clients we had when we started over 25 years ago.
At any time if you have any issues with your Website, please do not hesitate to contact us by telephone at 586-725-4038 or by email at support@abke.com and we will get back to you within the hour.
NOTE: If your technical support issues are pertaining to maintaining or changing your website and those issues will require an in-depth conversation, those support issues will fall under our maintenance plan and will be billed at our hourly maintenance rate.
