What's included in managed hosting — every month

What's included in managed hosting? "Operations", "managed hosting", "ongoing maintenance" — the words used in this industry are vague enough to cover anything, which means in practice they often cover nothing in particular. Here is exactly what we do every month, every week, and every night while you sleep — and the small list of things that fall outside scope.

The four layers we cover

Our operations work splits into four layers. The first three run whether you do anything or not. The fourth is the layer you actually notice.

Layer 1 — Infrastructure

The physical and network plumbing the site runs on. We host on Cloudways (managed infrastructure on DigitalOcean or AWS depending on region), which gives the site a clean LEMP stack, automated server-level backups, and a CDN at the edge.

• Server provisioning, sizing and scaling
• SSL certificate issuance and auto-renewal (Let's Encrypt or paid where required)
• Cloudflare configuration on Standard tier and above (WAF, caching rules, image optimisation)
• DNS management for the site (records, redirects, mail routing where applicable)
• Uptime monitoring with alerts (5-minute polling, multi-region)

You do not see this layer unless something goes wrong. That is the point.

Layer 2 — Maintenance

WordPress is a moving target. Core and plugins push security updates and breaking changes constantly, and an unmaintained install becomes a security incident waiting to happen. This layer keeps the site current and safe.

• WordPress core updates (security patches applied within 24 hours, point releases within a week, major releases tested in staging first)
• Plugin and theme updates with compatibility checking
• Database maintenance (regular cleanup of post revisions, transients, orphaned meta)
• Security scanning (malware, file integrity, suspicious login attempts)
• Daily off-site backups, retained 30 days minimum
• Disaster recovery testing — we restore a backup to staging once a quarter to make sure the recovery path actually works

Layer 3 — Performance

A slow site is a leaky site. Performance work is part of the monthly cycle, not a special engagement.

• Page-speed monitoring (Lighthouse / Core Web Vitals scores tracked monthly)
• Image optimisation and lazy-loading review
• Cache and CDN tuning
• Database query review when slow queries appear in logs
• Plugin audit — removing or replacing plugins hurting performance more than they help

Layer 4 — Changes and content

This is the layer you actually interact with. The scope here scales with tier, and we are deliberate about what is included so the monthly price stays predictable.

Starter: minor text edits, contact-info updates, swapping out images. Anything under 30 minutes per request, reasonable volume.

Standard: all of the above, plus small layout tweaks, new blog post formatting, monthly SEO touch-ups, and a small budget for design changes each month.

Shop: all of the above, plus WooCommerce-specific changes — adding products, updating categories, configuring promotions, payment-gateway tweaks.

Reporting

You get a one-page monthly report by email. It shows uptime, page-speed scores, security events handled, updates applied, backups completed and verified, and the changes we made on your behalf. It is short on purpose. If you only ever read the headline numbers, you should still know whether everything is healthy.

What is not included — and why we are clear about it

If you ask for something on the right column, we tell you up front that it is a separate quote. We do not push back to the call and then surprise you with an invoice. Most months, nothing on the right column applies.

How the boundary moves with tier

The split above describes the Standard tier baseline. The boundary shifts slightly with tier. On Starter, design changes count as quoted work. On Shop, WooCommerce product imports and small integration work fall inside the monthly scope rather than outside it. Moving up a tier usually pays for itself the first time you would otherwise have hit a separate-quote item.

The honesty constraint

The reason this scope is written down rather than left vague is that vagueness is what makes managed-hosting deals turn sour. We would rather you choose us with eyes open about what is and is not included, and renew at month twelve because the reality matched the description, than win a deal on a vague promise and lose you the first time we have to send a separate invoice.