What happens to a site without maintenance, what support consists of, how much it costs and what to agree on in an SLA.
Launch isn’t the finish line — it’s the start. A website runs on a server, uses dozens of libraries and third-party services, and all of them change over time. Left alone, even a good project starts slowing down, breaking and becoming vulnerable within a year or two. Here’s what support includes, what it costs and how to tell whether you need it.
What happens to a site without support
- Components go out of date. New versions of PHP, frameworks and plugins are released. Old ones stop receiving security updates.
- Vulnerabilities appear. Sites on popular CMSs with outdated plugins are a frequent target of automated attacks: hacks, malware, spam sent from your domain.
- Integrations break. Payment systems, delivery services and CRMs update their APIs — and one day payments on your site simply stop working.
- Things expire. The domain or SSL certificate isn’t renewed on time — the site goes down or the browser shows a “Not secure” warning.
- Disk space runs out. Logs, uploads and cache gradually fill the disk, and the server stops responding.
What support includes
24/7 monitoring
Automated availability checks every few minutes. If the site goes down, the team knows before your customers do — not from an angry buyer’s call.
Backups
Daily copies of files and the database, stored separately from the main server. And — more importantly — regular checks that the site can actually be restored from them.
Updates and security
Scheduled updates of the system, libraries and plugins, tested on a copy of the site so nothing breaks. Monitoring of SSL certificates and domain expiry.
Small improvements
Change a block on the home page, add a page, fix a form, add a new pixel. Tasks that are small on their own but impossible without a developer.
Speed and error monitoring
Tracking site errors, load speed and indexing issues — before they affect sales.
What it costs
Support is usually a monthly subscription with a fixed scope and an hour allowance for improvements. Ours starts from 2M UZS per month. For comparison, restoring a hacked site with no backup or an urgent payment fix in peak season almost always costs more than a year of support — not counting lost orders.
SLA: what to agree on
An SLA (service level agreement) is the contractor’s promise in numbers. Pay attention to:
- Response time for critical issues — for example, the site is down or payments don’t work.
- Resolution time for regular tasks.
- Communication channels and working hours: weekdays only or around the clock.
- The hour allowance for improvements and the hourly rate beyond it.
- Reporting: what was done during the month and which updates were installed.
Do you need support?
Support is especially important if:
- the site brings in sales or most of your leads;
- you have online payments and integrations with external services;
- the site runs on a CMS with plugins;
- you don’t have an in-house developer.
For a simple landing page during an ad campaign, backups and monitoring may be enough. But running an online store without support is risky.
A website is a business asset, like equipment or a car. Regular maintenance costs less than repairs after a breakdown.
If your site wasn’t built by us, that’s not a problem. We’ll audit it, assess the state of the code and server, and propose a support plan.
