Retained maintenance
Patching, dependency upgrades, certificate renewals, backup verification and a monthly written report on what changed and what we are watching.
03 — Other information technology services
IT Services and Support
The maintenance, monitoring and hands-on help that keeps everything running.
The short version
Retained support, hardening, migrations and the quiet maintenance that stops small problems turning into a bad Monday morning.
Software is never finished. Certificates expire, dependencies go end-of-life, a plugin update breaks checkout on a Friday afternoon. Retained support is the difference between noticing that yourself and hearing about it from a customer. We keep a small book of clients so that when you call, you speak to someone who already knows your system.
What this covers
Six things we are asked for most.
Monitoring and alerting
Uptime, error rates, queue depth, disk and certificate expiry. Alerts that reach a human, tuned so that an alert still means something at 3am.
Migrations
Host to host, server to cloud, or off a platform you have outgrown. Rehearsed on a staging copy, executed in a planned window, with a tested rollback.
Security hardening
Access review, MFA enforcement, secrets rotation, firewall and WAF rules, malware clean-up and post-incident write-ups when something has already gone wrong.
Performance work
Finding the actual bottleneck rather than guessing. Query profiling, caching strategy, asset delivery and Core Web Vitals, measured before and after.
Day-to-day help
Content changes, new pages, form tweaks, user questions, the thing that has been annoying your office manager for six months. Small jobs are welcome.
What you end up with
Deliverables, not deliverable-shaped promises.
- A named contact who knows your system
- Backups that have actually been restored and checked
- A written monthly record of every change
- A defined response time you can hold us to
Typical stack
- Cloudflare
- Linux
- Nginx
- Apache
- Docker
- Git
- UptimeRobot
- Sentry
- Automated backups
- WAF rules
How it starts
A thirty-minute call, then a short paid discovery that produces a written specification and a fixed price. If you walk away after discovery, the specification is yours to take to anyone.
The path
Same five steps, every time.
01
Conversation
Thirty minutes, no charge, no deck. You describe the problem in your own words and we ask the awkward questions. By the end of it we both know whether this is worth taking further.
You get: Outline of the problem, rough budget range, honest yes or no
02
Discovery
A short paid engagement where we sit with the people who will use the thing. We map the current process, find the edge cases that break naive designs, and write it down.
You get: Written specification, wireframes, milestone plan, fixed price for phase one
03
Build
Two-week cycles with something you can click at the end of each one. You see progress continuously, which means course corrections cost days rather than months.
You get: Working software on a staging URL, updated every fortnight
04
Launch
Data migrated and reconciled, team trained, rollback rehearsed, go-live in a planned window. We stay close for the first month while real use finds the last few edges.
You get: Live system, trained team, documentation, thirty days of included support
05
Operate
Monitoring, patching, backups and a monthly written report. Or a clean handover to your own team with everything they need. Both are a good outcome for us.
You get: Retained support, or full handover with documentation
Questions
The ones people actually ask.
Not on the list? Email us — we would rather answer it now than after you have signed something.
Retained clients get a defined response time written into the agreement, with a shorter window for anything that stops you trading. Everyone else gets a reply within one working day.
Yes, after a short paid audit so we know what we are taking on. Occasionally that audit concludes the honest answer is a rebuild, and we will tell you that before you sign anything.
Retainers run month to month after an initial three-month period, and you can give thirty days' notice. We would rather keep clients because they want to stay.
Then buy a block of hours rather than a retainer. We will tell you which one is cheaper for how you actually use us.
Hosting that fits the workload, deployment pipelines that remove the drama, and backups you have actually tested.
Start here
Tell us what you are trying to build.
A short conversation is usually enough to tell whether we are the right team for the job. No sales script, no obligation.
We reply within one working day. No sales sequence, no pressure.