Cloud & Servidores
The conversation repeats itself. Someone writes to us because their website stopped loading, or because the browser is warning their customers that the site is not secure. We ask who maintains it and the answer is almost always the same: it was built two years ago, it was paid for, it looked good, and nobody has touched it since.
It isn't neglect. It's that nobody explained at the start that a website isn't a painting you hang on a wall and forget. It's a service running twenty-four hours a day, and everything that runs consumes, expires and needs updating.
When a website «goes down on its own», it almost never went down on its own: something expired. And it's usually four things, always the same ones.
All four expire on different dates, the reminder doesn't reach the business owner but the inbox of whoever registered them —sometimes an agency that no longer works with you— and it only takes one to fail for the other three to be useless.
If you only add up the invoices, maintaining a simple website is cheap. These are the orders of magnitude; they vary by country and provider, but not by much:
That last line is the one that derails almost everyone's budget. The first three can be put on autopay and forgotten. The fourth doesn't automate itself, and it's precisely the one that prevents disasters.
The real cost of maintaining a website isn't the sum of those pieces. It's what happens the day one of them fails.
A site down on a Tuesday morning is an annoyance. The same site down on a Friday afternoon, mid-campaign, with the phone ringing and the developer who built it not answering for six months, is something else. At that point the cost is no longer measured in hosting fees: it's measured in calls that never came, quotes nobody requested, and customers who arrived, read «not secure» and went to a competitor.
And there's a worse cost because it's silent: the site that has been throwing an error for three weeks and nobody inside has noticed. The people who notice are outside, and they don't call to tell you.
The dominant model is still «I'll build your website for a fixed price and hand it over». On paper it's clean. In practice it carries an incentive problem: the day the project is delivered, the relationship ends. Whoever built it has already been paid and their attention moves to the next client. Your website, still running, is left without a technical owner.
It usually isn't bad faith. It's that nobody is paying for the hours of watching that everything stays standing, so nobody spends them. When something breaks, the repair is quoted as new work, and the business owner discovers that having a website came with fine print nobody ever read to them.
If you're going to pay for this, it's worth knowing what you're buying. Serious maintenance covers at least:
That last point looks like the softest one and it's the most often broken. Maintenance where nobody answers isn't a service: it's a monthly charge.
The question isn't how much it costs to maintain a website. It's how much not maintaining it costs you, and that figure depends on what your business has riding on the internet. If your site is a business card almost nobody looks at, the risk is low and you can live with it. If it's where your customers come from, leaving it without a technical owner is the most expensive decision you can make to save yourself a few monthly fees.
A website isn't finished the day it's published. That's the day it starts working.
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