A website is not furniture: it stands on someone else infrastructure that keeps changing after launch. Domains and certificates expire, browsers update, payment and email services change their requirements.
What maintenance covers
Domain and certificate renewal, hosting supervision.
Regular backups plus a check that they can actually be restored from.
Dependency updates and security patching.
Uptime and error monitoring — so that we learn about an outage, not your client.
Small content and layout fixes within an agreed number of hours.
What it costs
There are usually two formats: a fixed monthly package with an agreed number of hours, and hourly billing per request. The first is easier to plan around, the second is cheaper when the site is static and rarely changes.
Why it beats emergency repair
Recovering from a breach or a lost database almost always costs more than a year of maintenance — and takes days during which the site is down. A planned update takes a couple of hours and visitors never notice it.
We hand the project over with accounts and a short manual, so maintenance can be run in-house. But someone has to watch the renewals and updates — otherwise they are remembered only after the site goes down.