Support

A maintenance plan for the masses

Getting a website launched is only the first step. If your goal is success, then you will want your website to grow and evolve with your business. At the bare minimum, you will want to keep your website’s software up-to-date and will want a development sandbox where you can try out new changes and ideas without impacting your live website. You may also want us to keep a backup of your website’s source files and databases for you, in case disaster strikes.

For this reason, we’ve got an optional maintenance agreement for those clients who would like to keep us on standby to resolve ongoing issues and grow your website with you.

Those who are planning for growth may opt to engage us for ongoing maintenance. The cost structure of our maintenance agreement is simple: for most websites*, the annual fee is $1800 or 10% of your initial site’s budget, whichever is higher. With that annual fee, you get the following:

Priority access to our support staff without reactivation fees.**
Regular software updates whenever they’re released. This means minor version updates, for example Drupal 6.19 to 6.20 plus the associated troubleshooting. Major version updates (for example Drupal 6.20 to Drupal 7.0) may require additional time-and-materials costs. This is vital: your website software stays up-to-date and secure at all times, preventing your site from becoming obsolete and costing you thousands of dollars in a lump sum emergency rebuild should old software fail.
Web hosting on our private client servers is included with all maintenance agreements, $300 value.
Monitoring of your site’s search performance via Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.
An instance of your website on our in-house development server, where you can work nondestructively on your website to test out new things without risking breaking your live website.
A backup copy of your live website and databases, synced 2x/week. Consider this disaster prevention.
We retain all your website’s source files: photoshop files, logos, source files, videos, images, etc. so if you ever need to change something at your site’s core, we have the files needed for it.
Up to 1 hour/month of free diagnostics from iluminada support staff if users of your website report issues and you would like a skilled technician to investigate the issue. Fixes under 1/2 hour will be included in the free diagnostic. This alone nearly covers the cost of the plan. This removes a lot of uncertainty from your day-to-day business, and lets you leverage our skilled staff for “little questions” without worrying about our 1/2 hour minimum charge for a phone call or diagnostic issue.

* Magento websites require $2500/year or 10% of the site’s budget if software updates are desired. This is due to the unpredictability of Magento updates and the time involved in repairing issues.

** For those without a maintenance or storage agreement with us, we will need to get your site setup on our dev server and will need to obtain your site’s core files for any changes or support you may request from us. These items are billable on a time-and-materials basis at our normal hourly rate and will significantly increase the cost of any support requests.

For those without a maintenance plan:

Normally, when your site is built, we will provide you with a zip archive of your website’s source files (photoshop files, flash files, videos, the website’s html and php files, etc). For many people that’s enough of a backup and you need to go no further. We make ourselves available at our normal hourly rate for 3 months after the site’s launch in case some post-launch edits need to be made. But storing and backing up source files for hundreds of websites isn’t financially manageable for us, so 3 months after launch we will remove all your source files from our network. Unless you choose to remain engaged with us and want us to keep them.