For my business, my business partner and I paid an industry exclusive company to design and build a website for us. We got asked for input on each segment of the build, and they did what they said they'd do. Granted, I would do several things differently if I had it to do again, but that money is spent and I can't go back.

Now the website is ready to launch, and they are offering me to either take the finished product and manage/edit the content myself, or they will do it for me. If they do it, they provide daily backup and will go in and make any changes to the website that we request on a limited basis (like an hour per month??). They also provide emails for us and claim higher levels of website security. I asked what other benefits I get for my money versus having someone else host for me, and he said I could go that route if I like, they weren't in the business of trying to compete for that service, it's just something they offer... The cost is $179 per month, plus ongoing costs for the GoDaddy domain name lease.

They do offer much more aggressive online marketing and site optimization packages, which start at $500 per month. I told him that I'm not ready to go forward with something that costly as we are a startup business at this point.

This seems very expensive to me for a barebones website maintenance deal, but I know precisely bupkis about website maintenance. I'm willing to learn if it is something that doesn't take a long time, but would like input from those in the business.

Am I correct that this isn't a stellar deal? How hard is it to manage my own website? How often would it need tweaking? Anything I don't know that I don't know? Thank you for any input you might offer.

Well or start with, do you know anything about website maintenance? My guess is not so much even if you’re willing to learn and do it yourself. Add to that what is your time worth? A lot of these guys give you so much development time per month for content changes and such. The backups are likely automated, but someone has to go spend 10 minutes to make sure it’s working and be responsible for it being right, so there’s value there. How much content change are you talking about? Daily/weekly/monthly change? Does the content change require recoding or is there a user interface to change the content.

All of these are considerations. Without more detail it’s hard to tell. It’s going to boil down to your talents and how much time you’re willing to spend to “save” any money. I’d guess you’re not getting ripped off, but as I said a lot of detail is missing.

What sort of website is it?

Do you know if they built it on a publishing engine like WordPress?

First, thanks for the replies.

My talents? Shooting things (bow, rifle, handgun, syringe... all fair to middlin'), drinking cool beverages, and poorly executed online levity.

I have 2 businesses at the moment, I work at this new one (the one with the new website) 2 days a week. Not so many patients right now, so for now I have approximately 4-5 hours on those 2 days that I could spend on whatever. So from that perspective, the value of my time during those hours is seemingly not much. I know nothing of website anything. Para takes care of maintenance and taking the garbage out, I just show up and enjoy.

I don't anticipate tons of changes, though we sometimes want to make announcements (dental health month, don't be an idiot and leave your dog out in the subfreezing weather, etc). Not much turnover so staff info will hopefully not change much. As to recoding, I'm not sure, they haven't done the training on it yet (it's included regardless of whether they host or not).

These guys state in their agreement that they will provide hosting, emails, up to 1 hour of maintenance or changes, and daily backups. No SEO, etc., which they were clear about from the get go. They do, however, say that when it starts up it will be set up to maximize hits based on what they know about my area.

Aetocles, I don't know how they built it just now. As jb says, probably pertinent info. I will try to find out.

Does any of that help?

From my perspective, $179/mo. is very reasonable, almost too cheap. If this includes hosting (e.g. a VM image at AWS or similar) and bandwidth charges, your vendor certainly hasn't budgeted (m)any consulting hours on the site. There are a number of requirements that may not be obvious, including site monitoring (software that notifies proactively when a site goes down or is hacked), periodic application of security patches and updates, etc. Is your vendor proposing to provide these services at their quoted monthly rate? How will you prototype desired changes? Many people end up with a second web server just for prototyping and experiments, will this double your costs?

A few realities - there is no such thing as a "finished product" on a website, there will always be updates required as the world and expectations change. Why are you setting up a web presence? How do you expect that having one will help your business? If it accomplishes these goals, it will soon become indispensable. Learning as much as you can about what it takes to keep a site up, running, and relevant will help you make prudent decisions, not just about site contents, or costs, but also how to better accomplish your goals.

For example, you mention your vendor offers "site optimization" when what you probably mean is "SEO" (Search Engine Optimization). This is intended to make a site rank higher in search engine relevance (appear nearer the top of the list when people search for the terms you feel are important, thereby driving traffic to your site). This may or may not be something you want, but it can be extremely important for e-commerce or otherwise revenue-producing sites.

Another example: it is well and good to "do backups" but there are lots of details that can vary. If the backup strategy is to take periodic snapshots of a VM image, an easy and convenient strategy, recognize that this has consequences for restoration options, you can easily "snap back" the entire site to an earlier time, but it can make it much harder to reconcile partial changes compared to a file-by-file backup strategy. One must have a pretty good idea of the underlying infrastructure to assess the risks and address the specific failures that backups are intended to mediate.

He says his hosting will add several layers of enhanced security, a daily backup (no idea how deep that goes, I just assumed a site-wide backup that would likely not change much day to day unless new items were added/deleted/changed), up to an hour of work to alter or update the site each month (we would be responsible for providing what to say and images, etc).

SEO is what I meant to say, and for them to do that, it starts at $500 and goes up according to how much they spend on fB, etc. in addition to the base costs. It's a veterinary clinic.

For $179/month I'd want a dedicated server (not shared with any other web sites), ssl certificate and full VPN access to that server.

Right now I'm paying $72/year for shared hosting with no SSL. I keep up with it and manage it myself. For my city, my business should come up first (organically, not above paid ads) on Google and Bing. Not sure about Yahoo.

I find most SEO businesses dubious, mostly because I can't figure how a SEO company can promise both me and a competitor top search results. Saying they'll optimize the site for best results is one thing but promising top results to all clients is just not possible.

Warning dated experience showing here, I’ve not really been involved in this sort of thing since I retired 5 years ago(in IT terms that’s a lot of water under the bridge)....

The “hosting” likely means that they’re paying the $15/year fee to register the internet domain name, your website is probably a sub-site to other work they have under contract(not a bad thing actually), they are seeing to your daily backups and as far as security goes, they may have automated scripts to look for intrusions in the logs. Sounds like you’re also getting some monthly allowance for content changes, but not likey any new pages or art work. $179 is probably not out of line.

Now compare yourself to mark. Mark apparently has some HTML skills or a tool that will generate them and is familiar with how his website operates and is layed out. I’m not getting the impression this is you without some coaching or experience. As for the security part, unless you know what you’re looking for or have some sort of tool or script, this is not as simple as generating a website/page. Getting a dedicated server will be more expensive and unless you are generating a lot of traffic, it’s also unnecessary. You say they’re going to provide some “training”. That “may” solve some of the above, but then again it may not.

What probably won’t change will be the time that you’d have to put in to manage the site. Right now, that might not be a big thing. You may have plenty of time now, but you also will need to gain some knowledge about what you’re going to be doing, this a portion of that free time is going to be spent learning (not shooting things). If your business grows, the value and amount of time you spend would change. Your time would become more valuable and you may very well have less of it. Getting someone to take over may or may not be an easy thing.

Hope that helps. There are still details missing that would fill-in a reasonable decision, but you’re probably getting the idea.

What kind of business is it that you couldn't just buy a $16/mo Squarespace website for it?

Sorry for the delay guys! I did find out that the site was built on a Wordpress platform, if that helps at all.

I paid for the GoDaddy website fee myself, so it doesn't include that.

I ended up deciding to pay this company for at least a few months, until I can get a feel for options better. However, there will be no SEO done unless I do it. Clearly that needs to be done, as right now even if you search for the precise name of my new clinic, it doesn't come up on Google until the 4th page...