--- icon: wrench --- # Maintenance Most of our websites are on a **maintenance plan** — a monthly subscription that covers the ongoing work of keeping a site healthy. This page explains what's included, what isn't, and how to buy more time when you need bigger changes done. ## What "maintenance" actually means A live website needs continuous attention even when nothing visible changes. The maintenance plan covers: - **Software updates** — WordPress core, themes, plugins, PHP version, server packages. Applied on a regular schedule so vulnerabilities don't pile up. - **Backups** — automated, off-site, regularly tested. - **Security monitoring** — checks for malware, brute-force login attempts, suspicious file changes. - **Uptime monitoring** — the data that feeds the [Service status](../service-status) indicator on your website page. - **TLS / SSL renewal** — certificates auto-renew; we intervene if a renewal fails. - **Third-party tool licenses we use to build the site** — page builders, premium plugins, theme licenses, image and font services, and the other paid tools we picked to put your site together. We hold the licenses; your maintenance plan covers the cost for as long as you're subscribed. The *Bundled tool licenses* section below covers what changes if you ever cancel. - **Small content tweaks** — copy fixes, image swaps, adding or removing a section. Tier-dependent (see below). - **Quick fixes** — a broken contact form, a layout glitch after a browser update, a third-party integration that stopped working. What it doesn't cover: - **New features** — a new page type, a new integration, a bespoke piece of functionality. These are scoped as separate work (a new proposal, or a block of Support Hours — see below). - **Major redesigns** or substantial copy rewrites — same category as new features. - **Hosting itself** — that's a separate subscription (visible on your website's *Subscriptions* card). - **Third-party services you signed up for yourself** — email marketing platforms, CRMs, your own analytics upgrades, anything outside the toolset we picked for the build. Different from the bundled tool licenses above; those are tools *we* chose to use. ## Bundled tool licenses A modern website is rarely built only from free software. We pick a stack of paid tools — typically a page builder, a handful of premium plugins, a licensed theme, an image or font service — and we license them ourselves rather than asking you to sign up for each one. While you're on a maintenance plan, those licenses are included in the monthly cost. You don't see them as separate line items, you don't get the renewal emails, you don't pay each vendor directly. They just work. **If you cancel the maintenance plan,** you have two options: - **Take over the licenses yourself.** We'll hand you a list of which tools the site depends on and roughly what each costs. You sign up directly with each vendor and we transfer your site over to your accounts. From then on you pay the vendors and handle renewals. - **Replace or remove the affected functionality.** Some premium tools have free alternatives we can swap in, with the trade-off of fewer features. Other parts of the site may need rebuilding without them. Either way this is a piece of paid work, not a one-click change. We mention this not as a lock-in — it isn't, the licenses are real and the cost is real — but so you know what you'd be taking on if you ever wanted to leave the plan. Most customers stay on maintenance specifically because this part is one less thing to manage. ## Maintenance tiers Your website's tier is shown on the *Maintenance Support* line of the Information card on the website's detail page. Common tiers — yours may vary depending on the proposal: - **Basic** — covers the always-on work (updates, backups, monitoring, SSL). Quick fixes are billed against Support Hours. - **Standard** — Basic plus a monthly allowance of small content tweaks and quick fixes. - **Premium** — Standard plus a larger monthly allowance and faster incident response. The exact allowance per tier is specified in your proposal and on the maintenance subscription itself. If you're unsure which tier you're on, the Information card is the source of truth. ### Incident response by tier When a website on a maintenance plan has an incident, the **response and resolution time depend on the tier of that site's plan** — Premium-tier sites are committed to a faster response than Standard or Basic. The exact commitments by tier are spelled out in our [Service Level Agreement](../../help-and-support/legal-and-policies). Two practical consequences: - If you run multiple sites with us on different tiers, expect different response times across them when something breaks. Each site's response is governed by its own maintenance plan. - The SLA is the formal source of truth. If you've signed a custom SLA as part of your engagement, it overrides the standard one. Out-of-hours behaviour is the same regardless of tier under the standard SLA — see *Outside business hours* below. Round-the-clock incident response is available via a custom SLA on top. ## Extra Support hours If your tier's allowance isn't enough — say you need a larger content change, a feature added, or work outside normal scope — you can buy a block of **Support Hours** at a discount to our standard hourly rate. To purchase: - Open the website's detail page. - Click **Purchase Support Hours** in the action area. - Pick a block size and check out. The hours show up on the *Extra Support* line of the Information card. We draw them down as we do work; you'll see the running balance. Support Hours don't expire — anything you buy stays available until used. You can top up at any time. ## How we track what's been done Everything we do under maintenance gets logged in the **Updates feed** on the website detail page — see [Logs](logs). That's the audit trail. If you want to know whether a particular task was done, the feed has the entry. ## How to ask for maintenance work For small things (a typo fix, a date update, swapping an image), just email us with what you want done. We'll either log it as a maintenance entry directly, or come back if we need clarification. For larger asks (a new section, a third-party tool integration, a significant content rewrite), we'll usually respond with either *"yes, we'll do that this week"* followed by a Support Hours quote, or *"this is bigger than maintenance — let's spec it as a proper project"* followed by a proposal. ## Outside business hours Maintenance work runs during business hours (Mon-Fri 09:00-18:00 Athens time). We don't run a 24-hour on-call rotation — uptime monitoring still fires alerts to our inbox if your site goes down outside hours, but the response depends on whether someone happens to be online. By default, an out-of-hours incident gets investigated the next working day. If you need guaranteed round-the-clock response, we can quote that as a custom SLA on top of the standard maintenance plan. Reach out via [business@dmu.gr](mailto:business@dmu.gr). Scheduled planned work (a tricky update we want to do at 3am to minimise impact) happens outside hours but is agreed in advance, never as a surprise.