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. We design customized maintenance packages for our clients based on their needs. Most maintenance packages include the following:

• Priority access to our support staff without reactivation fees.**
• 15 minute minimum charge for all support requests instead of a 1 hour minimum.
• 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.
• Monitoring of your site’s search performance via Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.
• A development instance of your website, 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 diagnostics from iluminada support staff if users of your website report issues and you would like a skilled technician to investigate the issue. “Quick fixes” that come during the diagnostic are not charged. 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 hour minimum charge for a phone call or diagnostic issue.

* Magento websites must begin the retainer at version 1.7x.  Time spent getting your site to 1.7x is billed outside this retainer.  This is due to the unpredictability of Magento updates and the time involved in repairing issues between major updates.

** 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:

All tasks performed by iluminada staff, including (but not limited to) support calls, emails & diagnostic questions will be billed at our hourly rate, with a 1 hour minimum charge.  This minimum charge provides us with the time/budget we need to locate your files, obtain passwords and, in many cases, re-familiarize ourselves with your website.  We are not responsible for retaining source files, including photoshop files, logos, photos and documents, for those without a support retainer.