Understanding our Maintenance and Support Agreements

When people think of "hosting", this is typically what they're thinking of. A website needs somewhere to actually live, and we use modern cloud infrastructure to ensure your site is live and secure on the web.

This service includes maintenance of the hosting infrastructure where applicable, as well as 24/7 monitoring, and access to your website's code in case we need to work on it any time.

This cost also includes account management and dev-ops overhead, typically one hour for each per month.

This includes monitoring for and applying platform (e.g. Silverstripe) patches and updates; updating base code (e.g. PHP); and monitoring and addressing security issues or vulnerabilities with any third party services e.g. payments, integrations.

Our goal is for websites we look after to be up to date, all the time. This means we are asking clients for a dedicated budget for our team to proactively monitor for and apply updates and maintenance before they are critical.

This is a relatively new and significant change for us, and there is more information about it below.

All clients that have a Maintenance and Support contract with us can ask us for support for their website. There are two types of support that we offer:

This is the default for any clients with active agreements with us, but who do not have Retained Hours to use. Ad Hoc Support hours are available for all clients at our Standard Hourly Rate, and are simply charged for work performed (or via a fixed price quote by request).

Some clients choose to have Retained Hours with us. The advantages of retaining hours are:

• A Retained Hourly Rate, which is lower than our Standard Hourly Rate
• Guaranteed response times.

Our Retained Hours operate on a quarterly basis, so clients will book 3 months of hours and we track those over the quarter. This is particularly useful for ongoing work programmes because it is a good period of time to plan work, implement, test and deliver.

Our Retained Hours don't "roll over", so we work with our clients to ensure they have a plan to use their hours during the relevant period, or else move them over to Standard Support.

Our clients can always request Urgent Support via our Support email, and by using the word "Urgent" in the subject line. We'll confirm with you the request is, in fact, urgent, before performing the work at our Urgent Support rate.

Some questions we tend to get from new clients who are considering moving to Haunt Digital for maintenance and support.

A lot of agencies don't perform proactive as a fixed part of their maintenance agreements. We have decided that the cybersecurity environment has got to a point where a reactive approach to maintaining web platforms is no longer appropriate.

We understand that our stance on this is a little more strict than some agencies, but we have taken this approach because we are convinced it is better for our clients. None of the money we charge for Proactive Maintenance goes to waste, and knowing there is a proactive programme of work to keep their website secure means there is one less thing for our clients to worry about.

Yes. The Proactive Maintenance budget is based on your website's platform and overall complexity and security profile. Clients using Haunt's "Jamstack" or modern web architecture are still paying significantly less than those on traditional web platforms like Silverstripe.

The very best way to log any support request is via our support email [email protected]. In most cases you'll end up dealing with a developer, and you might be tempted to email someone you have worked with recently. However, the best approach is to use the Support email because there are always several sets of eyes on that, which means you'll always get a prompt response.