Managed Hosting & Care

The person who built it is the person who looks after it.

Managed WordPress hosting and ongoing maintenance, for sites I build and sites I inherit.

Most websites are built by one person and then handed to nobody. The agency finishes, the invoice clears, and the site starts drifting. Plugins go stale. A security patch gets missed. Something breaks and there is no one left who remembers how it was put together.

That is the gap this closes. I host the sites I build, which means the person who knows how the thing was made is the same person watching it. Not a support queue. Not a plan tier. Me.

Some of the sites I look after I built. Some I took over from someone who moved on. Both are welcome.

What’s included

Everything needed to keep a site up, current, and secure.

All of it runs quietly in the background, so a well-hosted site is one you never have to think about.

What you get

  • Hosting on Kinsta, running on Google Cloud Platform infrastructure. Server, caching, and a global CDN through Cloudflare.
  • SSL certificates installed and renewed, for every domain on the site.
  • Daily automated backups, retained and restorable.
  • Uptime monitoring, so a site being down is something I find out about rather than something you report.
  • Malicious traffic filtered before it reaches the site. On a busy site that is thousands of blocked requests a day.
  • WordPress, plugin and theme updates applied on a regular basis, and the site checked afterwards to confirm nothing broke.
  • PHP kept on a current, supported version, which is one of the biggest factors in how fast a site feels and one of the easiest to neglect.
  • Someone to email when something looks wrong.
Pricing

Priced by what the site actually uses.

A brochure site and a site taking twenty thousand requests a day are not the same job, so they are not the same price. Annual, billed in advance, excluding GST.

Standard

$960 / year

Where most sites land. Regular publishing, a growing media library, and enough traffic that an outage would actually be noticed.
  • One site, multiple domains
  • Staging environment
  • Everything in the list above
  • Monthly maintenance
Busy

$1,440 / year

High traffic, a large media library, or a site that carries real weight for the organisation behind it.
  • Heavier traffic and storage
  • Staging environment
  • Bot challenge protection
  • Priority response
Multiple sites

From $1,800

Several sites under one agreement, one invoice, and one renewal date. Priced together rather than site by site, because that is usually cheaper and always simpler.
  • Two or more sites
  • Everything in Busy
  • One invoice, one renewal
  • Priced as a group

Not sure which one fits? That is a two-minute conversation, and I would rather put you in the right band than the expensive one.

This is separate from the Creative Partner retainer, which is ongoing design and development support. Hosting is the foundation. The retainer is the work that happens on top of it.

It is all covered in a short written agreement, reviewed annually with 30 days notice before any change. Read the Managed Hosting & Care Agreement →

Why it matters

A site can look completely fine and not be fine.

Often for months at a time.

These are all real things I have found on sites handed to me, and none of them announced themselves:

A page builder that had not been maintained by its developer in years, still running the whole layout. A site two versions behind on WordPress with a known plugin vulnerability sitting open. A business page that earned the owner money, live and working, but linked from nowhere in the navigation for who knows how long.

None of that shows up as an outage. A monitoring service would report every one of those sites as perfectly healthy. It takes a person opening the site and actually looking.

Nearly 40,000 requests a day on the busiest site Four data centres Around 9 in 10 requests are legitimate The rest never arrive
Getting started

Two ways a site ends up under care.

If I build it

The first year of Managed Hosting & Care comes with it. No separate decision to make at launch, when you have plenty of other things to think about. Year two onward is quoted up front, in the proposal, before the build starts — never a surprise invoice for something that was never discussed.

If you bring one over

Moving an existing site — including one currently running on a page builder — is a day, not a project. It runs as a day-rate piece of work, on a staging copy first, and goes live only once it has been checked page by page.

See how builds are priced →
What’s not included

Being clear about the edges.

Hosting and care keeps the site running well. It does not cover changing what the site says or does.

Not included

  • Content updates, text and images
  • Design work and new features
  • SEO, marketing, and content strategy
  • Third-party software configuration

How that work happens

All of it is available, quoted separately. A focused day, a scoped engagement, or an ongoing retainer, depending on how much there is.

  • Day-rate sessions
  • Scoped engagements
  • Creative Partner retainer
Testimonials

Trusted with it, not just handed it once.

It felt like we were a team, more than client and service provider.

Samantha Reynolds

CEO & Founder, ECHO Storytelling Agency

I’ve worked with her on three websites and I’m always really pleased.

Adam Greydon Reid

Director, Holiday Films / Nimble Content

Lara expertly and seamlessly remade two of our websites, migrating them off outdated platforms to WordPress.

Joan Prowse

Producer / Director / Writer

Let's talk

If you're trying to make something clearer or more cohesive or more useful, let's talk.

Book a discovery call