We originally built ResaHost for ourselves. At Resaco, we work on marketing and websites, so website maintenance comes up in ordinary client work. Along with it comes a question that should be easy for a business owner to answer: who is going to take care of this?
There is also the experience of attacks on our clients' websites in summer 2022. I wrote about them in ResaHost's founding announcement, in Finnish. Restoring and rebuilding websites made the consequences of inadequate maintenance very real. I have no desire to repeat that experience.
The domain might sit with one provider, email with another and website maintenance with a third. There is usually a reasonable explanation for each arrangement. The trouble starts when something needs changing or stops working. The customer has to work out who owns the problem.
What bothers me is the amount of work this creates for the customer. They have already bought a service. Yet they still need enough technical knowledge to send the issue to the right person. A business owner can end up managing the very services they bought to save their own time. That is a poor division of work.
The starting point for ResaHost was to bring those maintenance responsibilities into one service. Hosting, domains, email and WordPress maintenance sit close together in the customer's working day. We wanted the service behind them to reflect that.
That decision commits us to considerably more than putting a list of features on a website. If we take responsibility for the whole service, we need to know what that includes. Who updates the plugins? How often is the enquiry form tested? What do we tell the customer when a repair requires additional work?
We have had to spell these things out in our own pricing too. The word maintenance leaves too much room for assumptions. A customer needs to see which tasks happen regularly and which work is agreed separately. A response time needs an equally clear explanation: it tells you when to expect the first reply. Completing the repair has its own timetable.
As a CEO, I find it easy to get excited about a new service. The harder question is whether the team can deliver it consistently every week. That takes agreed tasks, named responsibilities and a way to notice when something has been missed. If the service only works because the founder remembers to chase it, there is still work to do.
Maintenance also connects directly to our website work at Resaco. Launch is one stage in the customer's use of a website. Afterwards, people use it, content changes and software gets updated. Marketing will still be bringing visitors next month. Those visitors need to be able to contact the business then too.
I would not tell every agency to build its own hosting service. You take on a continuing obligation. For us, it makes sense because websites are already part of our work and we want clear accountability for keeping them running. The product has to make the customer's life easier by enough to justify the work involved in operating it.
That is why I judge ResaHost through fairly ordinary questions. Does the customer know where to get help? Can the person doing the work find the information they need? Does the agreed job get done without the customer having to explain it again? Those details determine the quality of the service.
If you are buying maintenance for your own business, ask the provider to walk you through one ordinary problem from start to finish. Who notices it, who starts the work and who keeps you informed? The answer tells you much more than a long feature list.
We wanted the same clarity in our free website analysis. The customer needs to understand what we know about their website and what should happen next.
