Do you really need a website maintenance service?
Let’s discover if a website needs to be maintained, or in other words, does it need to be monitored? If yes, how frequently should we monitor.
To understand this, every website or apps you visit in the world will require a server. This server is the running cost or must have costs. It is required to serve the website or apps to the viewers. It also serves a whole bunch of super technical stuffs such as anti-virus, bot detection and so much more which we will cover in the next blog post.
A short answer is, yes, you need some sort of website maintenance. If you look at Wix, Shopify or Webflow, there are paid plans which is already include the server costs so you can focus on building a website or app without the need to worry about the server side of things. They do have free plans, which does consume significant resources. The main purpose of their free plans is to let you try their platform, and if you like it, you will most probably upgrade to the paid plans, because free plans usually offer very limited features.
Why some agencies or web developers charge a maintenance service fee?
If you are in the market of looking for someone to develop a website for you, chances are, they will spin up a server for you. This means that they handle the server side of things to cater your website sizes and complexities if your website is huge and a lot of features.
There is no fixed price. Server providers also come in various price ranges, based on performance, reliability, security and also the ease of use. But let me just give you a range, a server to host just your website can be as cheap as SGD 1 per month or can be as crazy as thousands of dollars per month.
Typically, for 90% of small business owners will get away at the mid-range of servers between SGD 10 to SGD 500 per month. Note that this is just the cost of the server, it does not include configuration, optimizations and other complex technical server-engineering.
This is where you might be turned away of the maintenance cost. It is hard to pin point a cost, considering your website might grow and be ready future changes your website may have such as eCommerce if you are coming from a normal static website.
eCommerce system itself consumes a lot of data which requires a powerful server. So, what we have covered so far is pretty much the reason who you need a maintenance service for your website.
But what if I only need a website and not getting their maintenance plan?
You can still do that. But once your website is done. There will be no support if you want to update contents. Even if you ask the developer to help you out, it comes at a cost as “a tutorial fee” or “learning fee”. Somewhat like a course to help you run on your own.
With that cost of having them to teach you, you might as well get their maintenance plan which also saves you time and headaches if anything goes wrong. This post may sound a little biased, but it is important to understand this aspect of digitalization and the costs involved.
So now that you had a glimpse of what is website maintenance service is like, let me share you a pro-tip to be sure that you know what you are getting when subscribing to any website maintenance service plan.
- Be sure to ask them itemized and explain it to you what you are actually paying for.
- Ask for the type of server they use or at least a provider they use. (If their answer is they are using their own, chances are they are gatekeeping something). Here in Berlime Solutions, our hosting provider ranges from Hostinger, Siteground, Bluehost all the way to more powerful servers like AWS, Google Cloud, Vultr. *keep in mind that, there are no such thing as a proprietary server, it must come from a hosting provider. Heck, even hosting providers is outsourcing their servers from bigger players like Google and AWS.
- Ensure that if you want to make any changes, they are able to do that at no extra charges. (If it is a lot, it does not consider as changes, it is considered as a new development or project) *Really depends how huge your website is*
So what do you mean by website maintenance in ‘Singapore’?
Answer is, the vast majority of business owners do not care about the backhaul services. Unless their business is a tech-driven business like Luckin Coffee which utilizes an application for their consumers. This is nonexistent even the year before 2007.
Now, with digitalization. It is vital for businesses to equipped themselves with not only the general knowledge of servers or backend side of things but also the technical terminology and understanding of how the whole ecosystem works. With this alone, your idea of expansion does not have any limits.
No doubt Singapore adopts the best technology, for example things like SingPass or government websites and apps. Singapore already has that benchmark of how digitalization should be. Things are getting much faster with ease of access. Like food ordering, online shopping, etc, your business should leverage on web-development for you to grow and scale a lot faster. Especially at this digital age.
