Hosting or a care plan: what each one actually covers.

These two get mixed up more than anything else I sell, and it is not because anybody is being slow. It is because most of the industry bundles them, prices them as one number, and never says which half you are actually buying.

So here they are separately, with what each one covers, what neither covers, and the one place people genuinely do end up paying twice if nobody explains it.

The short version, if that is all you came for: hosting is where your site lives. Care is the work done on it. They are separate products at separate prices, and you can have either, both, or neither.

What hosting covers

Hosting is the server and the plumbing underneath it. If your site loads, hosting is working.

On my managed hosting that is $24.99 a month for one site, or $49.99 for two, billed monthly. What it buys is the server and its resources, a storage and visit allowance, server-level patching and SSL, uptime monitoring where the alert comes to me rather than to you, and a daily backup kept for 30 days while your site is on my hosting.

The allowance is worth one sentence because it is the part people brace for. It is the basis the plan is priced and reviewed on, not a switch that flips. Nothing is capped, throttled or cut off. If a site is over for two consecutive months I send you the numbers I am seeing and what I suggest, and any change starts the following billing cycle. Two months rather than one, so a busy season does not move you onto a bigger plan you do not need, and nothing is charged without you saying yes. The exact storage and visit figures are on your plan detail, at the checkout step, and in the Terms, so no number reaches you for the first time in a notice.

If you would rather hold the hosting account in your own name, that is the other path and it is a one-time setup from $250, with no markup from me on your host or your domain. Both paths are on the hosting page.

What a care plan covers

Care is the work done on your site, wherever it happens to be hosted. One plan, $149.99 a month, no tiers and no metered hours.

That covers WordPress core, theme and plugin updates, taken backup-first so anything that goes wrong is reversible, and run through staging first where the update warrants it. Bigger or riskier updates go through staging; routine ones I apply directly and check the site afterwards. Either way, if something breaks I roll it back and investigate, and you should never be sitting with a broken site because of routine maintenance.

It also covers security scanning and hardening, uptime and security monitoring, performance checks, a monthly report written in English, and small edits to what is already on your site: text, images, hours, prices, swapping content out. And a person rather than a ticket queue. There is more detail in what one care plan actually covers and on the care plan page.

The backups question, which is the one nobody explains

Here is where the bundling actually costs people money.

Backups belong to whoever holds the hosting account. That is the whole rule, and following it is what stops you paying for the same thing twice.

If I host your site, backups come with the hosting. They are a hosting feature, and the care plan does not charge for them. If the hosting account is yours, backups become a care-plan item, because then I am reaching into an account I do not control to make sure the copies exist and, more to the point, that they actually restore. Either way one product pays for it, never two.

Bundled pricing hides this. If hosting and care arrive as one number, you have no way to see whether the backup line is in there once or twice, and no way to drop the half you do not need.

One honest scope note while we are here. The backups on my hosting live inside my hosting account. They are not an archive you can reach back into after your site has left. If you want history, take it with you in the export while the site is still up. I would rather say that in advance than in an apology, and the whole exit is written out in what leaving looks like.

Which one you actually need

There are four combinations and all four are real answers.

Neither. A small site, recently built, on a host you are happy with, and you are comfortable running updates yourself and checking the site afterwards. That is a legitimate choice. You should know that when something does break, the fix usually costs more than the prevention would have.

Hosting only. You want the site online and looked after at the server level, and you either handle WordPress updates yourself or have someone else who does. The site stays patched at the server layer and backed up daily. Nobody is watching your plugins.

Care only. Your hosting account is already yours and you are happy with it, but you want the site itself maintained. This is the common one for sites I did not build. Your host keeps billing you directly at their price, I never mark that up, and backups come into the care plan because the account is not mine.

Both. Nothing to coordinate, one person accountable for the whole stack, and no arguing about whether a problem is the server or the site. Most of the sites I build end up here, and the two still arrive as two clear line items rather than one bundled number you cannot take apart.

Where the line falls when something goes wrong

This is the practical reason the split matters.

If the server is the problem and the hosting account is mine, it is mine to fix, and there is no third party for you to chase. If the server is the problem and the account is yours, I still troubleshoot it and work with your provider to get it sorted as part of the care plan. You just remain the account holder, which is what you wanted when you chose that path.

If the site is the problem, a bad plugin update or something broken in the code, that is care-plan work regardless of where the site is hosted.

What you should never have to do is work out which of the two it is before you know who to call. Whichever combination you are on, you tell me the site is doing something wrong and I work it out from there.

What neither one covers

Both plans are about keeping what you already have online and working. New pages, new features and redesigns are not metered into either of them.

That is deliberate. A plan that includes “some” new work is a plan that argues with you about how much. So new work is either a fixed-fee quote or it comes out of prepaid development hours, which run in 5-hour packs from $100 an hour down to $75 an hour at 30 hours and do not expire. There is no monthly reset and no use-it-or-lose-it clock.

Why I keep them apart

I could bundle these. One number is easier to sell and it would be a bigger number.

I do not, for two reasons. The first is the backups: bundled, you would be paying for them twice on one of the two hosting paths and you would have no way to see it. The second is that a bundle is hard to leave. Two line items means you can drop one and keep the other, or take your hosting elsewhere and stay on care, without renegotiating anything.

If you are weighing up letting me host the site as well, the case for it and what you get in writing are in why I host my clients’ sites. If you already know you want one or both of these, the hosting page and the care plan page have the detail, and I am happy to tell you on a call that you only need one of them.