Hosting and support: What happens after go-live and what belongs to you

On the day of go-live, a website is as up to date as it will ever be, if nobody looks after it afterwards. Browsers change, software develops security vulnerabilities, certificates expire. A website is therefore never quite finished. It needs someone who checks on it regularly.

Here we describe what support includes and how we organise it. Plus the question that comes up in almost every initial consultation: what actually belongs to me?

Updates and security patches

Every website is made up of many parts: the content management system, extensions, the framework underneath, the server's operating system. All of them receive new versions regularly. We distinguish between two kinds.

Security patches close known vulnerabilities. We install them as soon as they are available. We do not wait for a maintenance window. Security updates for the server itself install automatically.

Feature updates bring new capabilities, but sometimes also changes that shift something on your site. We test these first on a staging environment. Staging is a copy of your website that nobody except us and you can see. Only once everything works there does the update go into production, meaning your live website.

We run new websites in containers. A container is a self-contained package of the website and everything it needs to run. For an update, we start a new container next to the old one. Traffic only switches over once the new one responds properly. If something goes wrong, the previous version simply keeps running. An earlier version can be restored at any time.

Backups you can actually restore

A backup is only worth something if the restore works. That sounds obvious. But a backup that nobody has ever restored is just a hope.

This is how we do it:

• Automatic and separate. We back up databases, files and emails automatically to a separate system. If the server fails, the backups are not affected. Depending on the system, this happens several times a day or every night.

• Encrypted and in more than one place. For new projects, database backups are stored encrypted in two independent locations. Uploaded images and documents are also versioned. This means a file deleted by mistake can be recovered on its own.

• Restore into a copy. If an older version needs to come back, we first restore it into a copy and check the content. Only then do we replace the live version or recover just the lost content.

• Alert when a backup is missing. Every backup reports to our monitoring. If the report does not arrive, we get an alert.

Monitoring: we should notice before you do

Monitoring means that a separate system calls up your website around the clock at short intervals and checks whether it responds. We do not just check the home page. Every website has its own health check address that also tests the connection to the database. If an SSL certificate is about to expire, we get a warning.

If something fails, the alert comes straight to us. We also log failed logins to the admin area. If they pile up, we see it and can react.

Where your data is stored

We host with Hetzner in Germany. The data centres are certified to ISO/IEC 27001, an international standard for information security. Your website and the data on it therefore stay in the EU.

Because we process personal data on your behalf, such as the entries from your contact form, you need a data processing agreement with us under Art. 28 GDPR. We send it to you filled in, ready for your signature.

What belongs to you

Every website we build belongs 100 percent to you. There is no subscription and no contract term for the website itself. What you pay for on an ongoing basis is the operation: hosting, domain, SSL certificate, usually email mailboxes, plus backups and updates.

In practice, this means:

• Domain: We recommend that you are registered as the owner of the domain, even if we manage it technically. The domain is your address on the web. It should never be tied to an agency.

• Code: The code of your website belongs to you. On request, you receive all of it.

• Content: Text, images and database can be exported. They are not locked into a system that only we can operate.

• Access: You receive the login details for your admin area and for services that run in your name.

If you want to leave, you leave. Our contracts have no fixed term and can be cancelled with 14 days' notice to the end of the month. When you switch, we hand over files, database and media and help you move the domain. The trickiest part is usually email. Mailboxes and entries in the DNS, the internet's address book, have to move in the right order. Otherwise messages get lost during the transition. We plan this together with you.

The same idea, incidentally, argues for your own website rather than just a page on social media. On a platform, the platform decides what happens to your content. On your own domain, you decide.

In short

You hardly notice good support day to day. Updates run, backups are tested and we notice outages before you do. And if you want to switch one day, you take everything with you.

The packages available and what each one includes are listed under Hosting & Support.