Wordpress business site hosting / maintenance questions
June 2, 2020 10:45 AM Subscribe
The small company I work for has a Wordpress website which is hosted/maintained by an individual. This person is unresponsive whenever we have questions or issues. Should we move to another site hosting / maintenance company, or should we just find our own hosting service and manage this ourselves?
We contracted with a company several years ago to build our business site. It's about 10 static pages built on Wordpress. We were paying ~$75/mo to the same company to manage the hosting, maintenace & backups. A few years ago this company sold off the web division to another individual who now provides that service.
We have some issues with this individual, and wondering if the service he provides is worth the $75/mo, or if we should change companies, or even tackle this internally. When we have problems or questions about the site, it typically takes 7 days or more of consistent emails and phone calls to get a response. I also noticed recently that some of the plugins running on the site were significantly outdated (12mos + since last update). I'm not sure he's actually providing any service for us other than being a middle-man between us and a hosting company.
Is transferring the hosting and managing backups something that we can easily do ourselves? Or is this something still best left to a 3rd party? What should we expect to pay for a service like this - and should we find someone local again, or go with someone reputable and established online?
One potential kicker to this question is we're talking about building an ecommerce shop on a subdomain using WooCommerce at some point in the near future. We would do this ourselves internally (the current guy quoted us $4k to help set it up!), but it might be nice to have some support for that when we start the project.
Thanks for your input!
We contracted with a company several years ago to build our business site. It's about 10 static pages built on Wordpress. We were paying ~$75/mo to the same company to manage the hosting, maintenace & backups. A few years ago this company sold off the web division to another individual who now provides that service.
We have some issues with this individual, and wondering if the service he provides is worth the $75/mo, or if we should change companies, or even tackle this internally. When we have problems or questions about the site, it typically takes 7 days or more of consistent emails and phone calls to get a response. I also noticed recently that some of the plugins running on the site were significantly outdated (12mos + since last update). I'm not sure he's actually providing any service for us other than being a middle-man between us and a hosting company.
Is transferring the hosting and managing backups something that we can easily do ourselves? Or is this something still best left to a 3rd party? What should we expect to pay for a service like this - and should we find someone local again, or go with someone reputable and established online?
One potential kicker to this question is we're talking about building an ecommerce shop on a subdomain using WooCommerce at some point in the near future. We would do this ourselves internally (the current guy quoted us $4k to help set it up!), but it might be nice to have some support for that when we start the project.
Thanks for your input!
Definitely leave. I’d recommend another freelancer or maybe a small agency that will be better about following up. The premium Wordpress hosts are also pretty good if you want to DIY, but it sounds like your organization might not be good at staying on top of the site either, and just as you shouldn’t expect his behavior to change, you probably shouldn’t expect your organization to suddenly become better at this.
$4k is a reasonable quote for e-commerce setup, by the way. Not at all excessive. I still wouldn’t give it to him because you’ll have the same issues, either during the initial build or later on when you need someone who understands the site to jump in quickly to troubleshoot.
posted by michaelh at 12:37 PM on June 2, 2020
$4k is a reasonable quote for e-commerce setup, by the way. Not at all excessive. I still wouldn’t give it to him because you’ll have the same issues, either during the initial build or later on when you need someone who understands the site to jump in quickly to troubleshoot.
posted by michaelh at 12:37 PM on June 2, 2020
Also, if you move to a premium Wordpress host, they all have their own migration tools that should work fine. Otherwise, take a look at the Duplicator plugin. I’m very comfortable with shell, databases, etc, but I prefer those methods.
posted by michaelh at 12:40 PM on June 2, 2020
posted by michaelh at 12:40 PM on June 2, 2020
This thread is closed to new comments.
Moving a WordPress site from host A to host B is easy, assuming you have admin access and shell access to the system so you can tarball the db and files to move elsewhere. I'm also assuming you own your domain but will need to point DNS records at the new site, but that's not particularly hard either.
It sounds like you'd be fine with an account on WPEngine for like $25 a month. Can't speak to the WooCommerce question specifically but for the love of all that's holy - don't look to someone who doesn't apply WP updates on the regular to handle anything related to e-commerce.
posted by jzb at 11:44 AM on June 2, 2020