In an era where data is the new oil, effectively utilizing data is crucial for the growth of every organization. This is especially the case when it comes to taking advantage of vast amounts of data stored in cloud platforms like Amazon S3 - Simple Storage Service, which has become a central repository of data types ranging from the content of web applications to big data analytics. It is not enough to store these data durably, but also to effectively query and analyze them. This enables you to gain valuable insights, find trends, and make data-driven decisions that can lead your organization forward. Without a querying capability, the data stored in S3 would not be of any benefit.
To avoid such scenarios, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides tools to make data queries accessible and powerful. Glue Crawler is best suited to classify and search data. Athena is a service used to make quick ad hoc queries. Redshift Spectrum is considered a solid analyst capable of processing complex queries at scale. Each tool has its niche and provides a flexible approach for querying data according to your needs and the complexity of the tasks.
As we step further into the digital age, the importance of data security becomes increasingly apparent. Our interactions, transactions, and even our identities are frequently translated into data, which is stored, transferred, and processed in the digital realm. When this data falls into the wrong hands, the consequences can be disastrous, both for individuals and for organizations.
Amazon S3, a popular storage solution offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), serves as a repository for a vast amount of this data. With its robust scalability and ease of use, it has become a favored choice for many organizations. But as with all data storage services, it's crucial to ensure that the data stored on Amazon S3 is secure, particularly when it's 'at rest'—that is, not actively being used or transferred.
File handling in AWS is essentially a cloud storage solution that enables corporations to store, manage, and access their data in the cloud. AWS provides a wide range of cloud storage solutions to handle files effectively.
Among these, Amazon S3 is the most popular and widely used service for object storage in the cloud. It offers highly scalable, durable, and secure storage for any kind of data, such as images, videos, documents, and backups, at a low cost.
Providing website maintenance services is a great way to generate monthly recurring revenue from your web development business. In this article, we cover all the essential and profitable web care plan services you can offer to clients and the tools you need to do it.
If you’re looking for an easy way to provide more value to your clients, keep them for longer, and earn recurring revenue – offering website care plans (A.K.A ongoing maintenance) is one of the best ways you can do it.
In this article, we take you through the essential web maintenance services all website owners need and how to offer these services to your clients with the help of WPMU DEV’s built-in tools.
Maintenance services involve keeping your clients’ websites secure, up-to-date, and fully optimized – giving them complete peace of mind to run and grow their business.
We also surveyed our 50,000+ members and researched a number of web developer websites to ensure we give you the best options in this article.
By the time you’re done reading this article, you’ll know:
What types of maintenance services you can offer to your clients.
Why maintenance services can be a profitable source of monthly recurring revenue for your business.
How to set up website care and maintenance service packages with WPMU DEV.
Ongoing website security and continuous peace of mind is a major reason why clients invest in website maintenance services.
Regularly scanning for vulnerabilities, removing malware, and checking for any spam helps to protect your clients’ sites and ensure these will not be hacked, attacked, and taken over.
2. Website Backups
Backups provide clients with additional peace of mind, especially if they know their website is being regularly backed up and fully-restored in the event of a disaster or accidental deletion.
3. Repairs and Fixes
Broken links and page errors frustrate users and can have a negative impact on a website’s search rankings. A good maintenance routine involves checking the site for broken internal and external links, errors, and issues caused by bugs, plugin conflicts, etc.
4. Software Updates
WordPress sites rely on core software, plugins, and themes, and these are updated regularly by developers, so it’s important to keep both critical and non-critical software and site components regularly updated too to keep the client’s business running smoothly online and avoid security issues.
5. Support (Content Updates & Minor Tasks)
Many clients are just too busy or lack the skills to perform content updates, add new pages, add new links to their site header, footer or sidebar, reconfigure menus, etc.
Offering a service that includes a certain amount of support hours allocated to performing content updates and minor site tweaks and tasks can add tremendous value to your web care plan.
6. Site Speed & Performance Optimization
Clients that depend on new leads and sales coming from their website need fast-loading sites that are continually being optimized for better performance. Being able to quickly identify and fix issues that are slowing down their site’s speed is critical.
7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
In addition to optimizing sites for speed, clients also need their sites to be optimized for search engines. This involves identifying SEO issues that are affecting their site’s ranking and their web traffic.
8. Uptime Monitoring
Sending clients alerts if their websites become inaccessible online and notifications when their sites are up again is extremely helpful.
9. Reports
Regular reports are not only useful for clients, but they also provide proof of the great work you’re doing for them. Send reports detailing security, SEO, or performance issues on their site, as well as analytic reports, and details of any updates or changes made to software, plugins, or themes.
10. Site Functionality and Tweaks
Having a website where essential functions work correctly (like filling in signup and registration forms, sending enquiries through contact forms, keeping privacy policies compliant with rules and regulations like the GDPR, etc.) is very important for clients. Part of your website maintenance service is to check that everything on the site is working correctly on a regular basis.
11. Analytics
Providing clients with analytics reports that help them understand key site metrics like user behavior and identify traffic trends can help them improve their content and see significantly better results in their business.
12. Browser Compatibility Testing
Another important service that must be done at regular intervals is to make sure that a client’s website displays correctly across all browsers and devices. This includes areas like mobile responsiveness, accessibility, etc, which can be affected when changes are made to the site or the site’s theme, new plugins are added, etc.
Additional Maintenance Services
In addition to the above website maintenance services, there are additional services you can provide, such as:
Content Writing – If you manage content updates for clients, why not offer them a content writing and publishing service too?
PPC Management – Pay-per-click ads need ongoing management. This service can be offered as an add-on.
Email Marketing – This service can be offered as an add-on and include writing, scheduling, and sending regular email newsletters to your clients’ subscribers.
Renewals: Domain names / SSL Certificates – If you manage client sites or resell hosting, you can also include managing renewals for domain names and SSL certificates (i.e. paid SSL certificates with OV and EV options to validate business identity).
Website Maintenance Checklist
Providing regular maintenance ensures that your clients’ websites remain secure, optimized, and free of errors and issues that can affect the user experience of their customers.
Offering these services, however, is one thing. You also need to know when to do what.
So, to help you design your own website maintenance services schedule, check out our comprehensive checklist of WordPress maintenance tasks.
Why Offering Website Maintenance Services Is a Great Opportunity
Keeping a WordPress website secure, up-to-date, and fully optimized is not hard, complicated or time-consuming.
Especially with automated features built into WordPress like enable auto-updates, various applications and plugins that provide one-click troubleshooting scans and automated solution fixes, and other fully and semi-automated services (we’ll cover all this later in this article).
Any WordPress site owner or user could do basic website maintenance themselves if they invested some time into learning the fundamentals of:
Many clients, however, lack the time and/or the interest to learn these skills.
Many businesses don’t want to figure out how to create and run an efficient maintenance schedule for their websites, they are happy to pay someone else (i.e. YOU) to do this for them.
In other words, here is what most clients want to hear you say…
“I’ll take care of your website. If you have any issue with your website, you call me and I’ll take care of it.” – Guigro(WPMU DEV member)
The bottom line: Providing maintenance services is a great opportunity to generate monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from your web development business while helping your clients keep their websites running at their best.
So, providing clients with website maintenance services is a “win-win” deal and earning monthly recurring revenue sounds mouth-watering.
How realistic and achievable, however, is earning MRR from website maintenance services? And what kind of services do you need to provide to earn this?
Let’s take a look…
Monthly Recurring Revenue Potential – Setting An Achievable Target
“I need about 45 customers to meet my target of 5k/month recurring. I think I’ll hit this by the end of the year.” – David Baker(WPMU DEV Member)
How much recurring revenue do you want to earn each month from your web development business?
How many clients would you need?
How much would you need to charge your clients? Can they afford to pay this amount?
These are all great questions! Fortunately, we have an active member community of web developers we can ask….
And that’s exactly what we did to get the answers.
We’ll start with the end in mind — earning monthly recurring revenue — and work backward from there.
In terms of setting ideal monthly recurring revenue goals and hitting these targets, many or our members actually shared these with us.
Our research shows that many web developers on average:
Would be happy to earn US$5,000-US$10,000 per month billing clients for recurring services.
Would need around 25-50 clients on a monthly maintenance plan to hit this target
Can personally handle and maintain around 50 clients (if running smaller operations, e.g. 1-person or a small team).
The following are some of the actual responses we received from members regarding their targets and earning a monthly recurring income by providing website maintenance services:
“I need about 45 customers to meet my target of 5k/month recurring. I think I’ll hit this by the end of the year.”
“My goal for this year is 50 clients, and I currently have 35.”
“My goal is 50 (on basic plan), which is the number of sites I believe I can manage on my own.”
“I would like to get $5,000/mo to be able to have a full-time person doing these things, so that way I have time to keep building the business, and other tasks. I would need about 50 clients for this.”
“If that was my only job, I’ll try to make only website maintenance. I’ll need around 50 clients and I’ll manage them every day.”
“In an ideal world I’d host all my sites here and charge enough for me to earn a healthy basic living with like 40 or 50 total clients.”
“My goal is $5,000 per month. The number of clients required depends on the chosen plans I sell. For example, if I could sell 5 of my highest plan, I would be there. If I sell only my lowest plan, this would take about 250 clients/sites.”
Not all web developers, however, are looking for “retire and sit on the beach” income from maintenance service revenue.
Some would be happy if the services covered their expenses or simply provided them with additional income.
For example, consider these responses from our members:
“My goal is to have my monthly expenses covered by my recurring maintenance income.”
“If maintenance sales can cover my monthly expenses (personal + business) then I’m happy. I’d need about 30 clients…”
“For us it is all extra income since we usually set it and forget it until the client has an issue.”
Now that we have looked at setting targets and what it takes to reach these, let’s look at what kind of pricing you would have to set for your services to hit your goals.
Pricing Your Maintenance Services – Setting Realistic Prices
“$110 USD for Weekly, $165 USD for Daily. Having a membership site and or eCommerce component will increase the monthly cost.” – P Taubman(WPMU DEV Member)
What can you realistically charge clients for providing website maintenance services?
While in theory the answer is “charge whatever you want, it’s your business!” we all know that you can only charge as much as the client is willing or able to pay you.
Working this out, however, is not that simple either. Pricing services is tricky and many factors can affect this, including:
How you communicate the value of your services.
Your fixed and variable costs, the clients you are targeting.
Which country you’re doing business in.
Current social and political climate, economic cycles, etc.
Sometimes, you can undersell your services for years and it often takes trial and error (or breaking through personal fear barriers and limitations in your self-belief) to get the pricing formula right for your business.
Fortunately, some of our members provided us their actual pricing straight up, (while others told us their services simply ranged from xxx to xxxx).
Here are some of the actual responses we received from members that were happy to share their pricing:
“$110 USD for Weekly, $165 USD for Daily. Having a membership site and or eCommerce component will increase the monthly cost.”
“Currently, $100 a year for the bare minimum up to $100 a month for the more intensive hosting plans.”
“Starting at $35/month but scales according to needs, up to $300 or more.”
“I have Basic (US$45 p/mth), Pro (US$85 p/mth) and Premium (US$145 p/mth). Basic is monitoring and weekly updates, Pro includes performance and troubleshooting and Premium is for transactional sites and also includes SEO optimization, serving from a CDN and 1 hr of ‘consulting’.”
“From R$40 (US$7) to R$700 (US$130) depending on the client’s needs.”
“Care plans start at 5 € (US$5.30) per month and go up to 490 € (US$518) per month.”
“Currently plans range from 120€/2h (US$127) which is the minimum, to 4490 € /120h (US$4,750) of work per month.”
“The minimum charge is $150 to $600.”
“$50 per month.”
“Flat $100 to cover all. single plan.”
“I made a small detailed quote, but they can’t change anything about it. It’s a 100$ a month fee that they pay once a year. It pays my personal server so it’s perfect.”
The maintenance plans are $88/month incl GST, but I’m beginning to wonder if that is too little. I offer updates to some really good clients, but most likely removing it for others now.”
“I try and maintain a $300 average charge per maintenance plan depending on the client and need around 20 clients. Again its mixes and matches. My goal is to move clients to WPMUDEV so I only have to keep abreast of a single set of primary plugins, thereby making the plans manageable!”
“$99/mo (Weekly Plugin + Theme Update, 24/7/365 Total Care Response Team, Weekly Cloud Backups, Uptime Monitor, Monthly Reports), $159/mo (everything mentioned, plus Unlimited Website Edits, Link Monitor, Security Hardening/Monitoring), $229/mo for e-Commerce stores which include everything mentioned, but for E-Commerce.”
Our research shows that the members we surveyed charge their clients anywhere from US$5 per month to US$600 p/mth in maintenance fees or more, with an average of around US$170 p/mth).
The members we surveyed charge their clients between USD$5 – USD$600 per month for web maintenance services.
Other members mentioned how they calculated their pricing:
“It is usually the price of making the website, divided by 12, and with a contract of at least 12 months of stay.”
“A set percentage higher than your prices [editor’s note: your prices = WPMU DEV member pricing] for setting up and maintaining the site and the plugins and various issues.”
“I use a percentage based markup, typically 10-30% above my total costs.”
“Monthly, quarterly, or annually, depending on client preference.”
“Depending on the client, either a monthly recurring fee, or a quarterly, semi-annual or annual one. The price stays the same whether the customers pay monthly or annually.”
“Currently I provide a yearly plan – a low fee for plugin set up and access, and then a by-the-hour charge for fixing issues caught by uptime monitoring, defender scans, restoring from backups, etc. This way I can offer a low yearly price to small businesses I work with, and then still charge appropriately when there’s work to do. I am also working on launching a more comprehensive monthly hosting and plugin plan that includes a lot more hands on management.”
It varies but I’m going to need to standardize it, and dramatically increase it somehow as I have some clients who are still paying me what I started charging them like 8 years ago. Haven’t really settled on the best way to do that yet, my older clientele aren’t typically wealthy people and I’m going to need to figure out something else for them or give them a lot of time to figure something out… I’m going to have to adjust it but I don’t want to screw ’em over either and obviously I can’t just email them and be like “Y’all it’s gonna be 5 times what you’re paying me now, thanks.” So… still thinking on that.”
There’s one more question we should address before we take a look at the services you can offer to your clients with WPMU DEV and show you how to start building your maintenance service packages.
Is Providing Website Maintenance Services Profitable?
Many web developers offer website maintenance services. But, are maintenance services actually profitable on their own or as an upsell to your web development services?
A simple way to research this is to fire up Google and search for terms like:
website maintenance services
website maintenance services list
website maintenance services near me
website maintenance services cost
website maintenance proposal
website maintenance for small business
website care plans
The presence of paid ads on Google search results is normally a good indicator of profitability, especially if you see the same ads regularly appearing on search results.
After all, no business can afford to keep advertising products and services that are unprofitable.
Paid ads on website maintenance related searches is a good indication of profitability.
Now that we have established that website maintenance seems to be profitable, let’s look at some actual examples of maintenance services web developers are offering.
Providing Website Maintenance Services to Clients
“Website maintenance is a small part of our revenue stream, but it is important part as it allows us to react and work faster compared to clients that have their sites hosted somewhere else, which ultimately saves our clients money.” – Antti-Pekka(WPMU DEV Member)
When we asked our member community of web developers whether they provide website maintenance services, and if so, what kind of services they provide, here are some of the responses we received:
Do you provide website maintenance services (or plan to)?
“Yes, for 90% of customers.”
“We inform the client there are minimum maintenance fees.”
“Usually my company offered maintenance services included with initial proposal. Such as website development + 1 year of maintenance.”
“I’m beginning to offer the services. They include all the WPMU DEV plugins, as well as “regular” plugin/theme updates. The updates will be with the Safe Updates feature, my main selling option.”
“Our focus is on improving clients online sales, which includes driving traffic through SEO and online marketing + optimizing sites for conversions and improving the sales process after that through automation etc. Keeping everything updated on their site and solving conflicts is part of it.”
“Website maintenance is a small part of our revenue stream, but it is important part as it allows us to react and work faster compared to clients that have their sites hosted somewhere else, which ultimately saves our clients money. One-click staging, SSO and automatic daily backups being the most important aspects of this.”
What kind of services do you provide?
Here are some of our members’ responses…
“Maintenance services can range from providing core, plugin, and theme updates and backups, to full range of services that also include security and performance monitoring, SEO, reporting, etc.”
“I provide hosting, uptime monitoring, backups, updates, malware scans, blocklist monitoring, GDPR checks (automatically updating privacy policy when necessary), SEO ranking and functional tests.”
And an aggregate of the maintenance services they provide:
Backups: Daily/weekly full-site cloud/local backup, and backups before updates in case rollback is required
Security: Optimization, brute force IP lockout, vulnerability scanning and malware removal, country-blocking rules for web application firewall and block lit monitoring, spam checking, full restoration if the site is hacked or crashes.
Performance: Caching & enhancements, image compression, CDN for JS/CSS/image optimization
Uptime: 24/7 uptime monitoring, with email & webhook notifications
Setting up Google Analytics and forms
Weekly/monthly reports
Technical assistance to solve plugin/themes conflicts.
Content modification (Up to 5 basic modifications/uploads per month).
GDPR checks (automatically updating privacy policy when necessary)
Technical SEO optimization and audits
When asked how they bundle their services, few members said they offer maintenance as an additional service, but most members said they prefer to bundle maintenance with hosting.
There are some good reasons for this too:
“At the moment I bundle it with hosting. I’ll probably continue to do that. If they can see the actual number for the hosting amount, then I get questions about hosting at some cheap trash company and I end up having to explain why my hosting is worth the cost, which is mostly technical reasons that they don’t understand anyway.”
“Bundled with hosting, this is the goal. Bundled without hosting – trying to avoid. Bundled as part of a website rebuild or new – prorated over 1,2 or 3 years.”
“We bundle it together with our initial proposal. Hosting is by default for me and I’m not comfortable to use other hosting that is not reliable. In short, I will convince client to utilize my whole package (dev + design + SEO + maintenance + upgrade + hosting + domain name provider + DNS & security provider)”
“Hosting is included in our plans. If a client has hosting and comes to us for maintenance, we do not automatically take over their hosting and transfer to our account. In the case that the client is on terrible hosting, we may charge a surcharge.”
“I have three main plans, depending on the amount of content updates or consulting they want per month. Hosting is included in all plans. If they insist on using their own host and it is decent, I’ll let them host there with the understanding that the care plan investment price doesn’t change and hosting support isn’t included (unless they want to pay me to work with their hosting provider). We set clear boundaries.”
“We have a few different models that we use. First, we have the stand-alone models where we basically resell WPMU DEV tools, minus hosting. Clients can select unmanaged which gives them white-labeled Hub access and access to the WPMU DEV plugins and site management tools. The managed plans let the clients have the WPMU DEV tools active on their site, but managed by us. So the former is set up similar to Manage WP. The latter is more of a full-service maintenance plan. Then we have the managed hosting plans. There are 2 models here as well: Basic which literally just re-sells WPMU DEV plans. Managed, which includes hosting as well as the aforementioned managed care plans.”
“We offer maintenance on a weekly basis, as default. However, we also offer a daily plan for an additional fee.”
“I resell managed hosting which includes the maintenance, but I also offer the maintenance for third-party hosting which includes the same features. Full-site backups are weekly instead of daily, though.”
“Maintenance is a separate line item. I am not sure what the price is, but I know the maintenance plan includes all core, plugin, and theme updates as well as 10 hours per month of web content updates/changes.”
“I work with a lot of small businesses with varied budgets, so I have to adjust the services to fit what they need and can also afford.”
“Hosting, email marketing, SEO, maintenance and other plans are being sold within their own tiers, but they’ll be connected with each other as upsell-products.”
What Others Charge For Maintenance Services
In addition to researching what our members had to say about offering maintenance services, we also looked at other sites for examples of pricing.
For instance, according to research from ExpertMarket, different sized websites have different average monthly maintenance costs…
Average monthly website maintenance costs (USD). Source: ExpertMarket.com
Here is an Australian site targeting small to medium-sized businesses for website maintenance services…
A site maintenance services page targeting small to medium-sized businesses. Source: VisualDomains.com.au
Here is another business offering website care plans from basic to high-level support services, with additional support addons.
This business offers web care plans for websites of all sizes, plus extra developer support options. Source: Strong.Digital
To see what maintenance services web developers are offering in your country or business region and their pricing, enter some of the suggested search phrases listed earlier into Google and add geo-related keywords (e.g. your city, country, or “near me”) to your search.
Now that we have looked at various website maintenance services you can provide to clients in your web development business and done all the background research to confirm that offering these services can be a profitable way to generate MRR, let’s show you…
How To Build Your Website Care Plan Packages With WPMU DEV
Ideally, you will want to offer your clients a quality service that delivers maximum value for money with a minimal investment of your time and resources.
This means using tools, automation, leverage, and other efficiencies whenever and wherever possible.
WPMU DEV provides everything you need to deliver high-quality professional website maintenance services that can be customized to suit your business and your clients’ needs and budgets.
As an example and to show you what’s possible with WPMU DEV, let’s show you how to set up the following website care plan packages in your business…
Offer your clients a complete website maintenance service to suit their needs and budget with WPMU DEV.
We’ll also add the additional services shown below as add-ons that you can upsell to clients…
Offer these additional services and various maintenance options as addons and upsells.
Let’s go through the services listed in the above menus to show you how you can easily and quickly build your website maintenance service packages with WPMU DEV:
Software Updates
From our site manger, The Hub, you can easily manage all your clients’ sites’ core software, plugin, and theme updates.
This includes performing manual or automated updates, adding and removing plugins and themes on client sites (individually or in bulk), configuring updates to be ignored for specific plugins and themes, and more.
Easily manage core, plugin, and theme updates for unlimited sites from The Hub.
Additionally, you can use our robust Automate tool to set up automated update schedules for unlimited sites.
Use The Hub and Automate to save time performing vital update checks and scans.
The Hub’s Automate feature lets you automate checks, schedules, backups, scans, and updates for all your clients’ sites, giving you a virtually “hands-free” software updating service to resell.
Use The Hub and Automate to save time performing vital update checks, scans, and backups.
Essentially, you are offering clients a service that not only updates their WordPress core software, plugins, and themes, but also checks the site to make sure that it’s safe to update.
Automate also performs a full backup of the site before updating, ensuring your client experiences no downtime or disruption.
“…it’s extremely convenient to be able to have all of my clients in one panel with a one-click login, see all the plugins out of date, quickly restore backups, etc. It’s a huge timesaver.” –Daniel M
Start Profiting From Software Updating Services
Providing regular software updates is an essential service that all websites need.
You can automate this service and include it in all your web care packages.
Backups are uploaded securely to our servers (if your clients host their sites with us) or external storage locations like Amazon S3, Google Drive, and Dropbox.
Provide automated scheduled backups to clients with your website care plan.
You can provide this service even if your clients choose to host with someone else using our Snapshot Pro plugin.
Set up automated backups for externally hosted client sites using Snapshot Pro.
Start Profiting From Automatic Backup Services
Our range and flexibility of backup options means that you can set up different plans for different website care packages.
For example, monthly backups to external storage locations for basic plans and more frequent backups (weekly, daily, hourly) for premium plans.
Another value-added website maintenance service you can offer to ensure your client’s peace of mind is ongoing website threat management and protection through security monitoring.
You can quickly and easily set up and configure a website security monitoring service for clients that will automatically scan their website files and database for vulnerabilities, block suspicious code or activities, and prevent hackers from accessing their website.
All this is done via The Hub’s Security section, which links to and is powered by our Defender security plugin.
Monitor all your clients’ sites for security threats from The Hub’s Security section.
This service will alert you if anything suspicious is taking place on their site, allowing you to quickly jump in and rescue your client’s business from potential disaster.
Defender keeps your client sites safe and protected automatically.
Start Profiting From Security Monitoring Services
Using The Hub and Defender provides WordPress security features like scans, security tweaks, IP lockouts, Two-Factor Authentication (2FA), login masking, firewall, and more.
When planning your service packages, consider offering scans, monitoring, and alerts as part of your basic plan, and adding a “troubleshooting and problem fixing” component as part of your premium offering.
For example, if you charge an hourly rate for providing technical support, your premium website care plan could include a number of hours per month (e.g. 2, 4, etc.) of “priority support” time allotted to fixing and troubleshooting website issues related to security, optimization, hosting, etc.
Offering an uptime monitoring service to clients whose businesses depend on their websites being up and running is another powerful way to ensure their peace of mind.
You can set up, configure, and fully automate this service via The Hub’s Uptime feature.
The Hub’s Uptime feature automatically notifies clients if their site goes down.
Uptime monitors a website’s uptime, downtime, and response times, and the service can be configured differently for each client.
Set up and apply different Uptime configurations to client websites to suit your service plans.
With Uptime’s 24/7 automated monitoring service, your clients (and you) will receive instant email notifications if their website goes offline at any time of day or night.
“For a lot of clients, I put Uptime Monitor on the site, and when the site goes down, clients think I am the superstar. And then I bill to fix the site for whatever reason it is down.” – Blake W(WPMU DEV Member)
Start Profiting From Website Monitoring Services
This is a ‘set and forget’ service that can be included in all your web care plans, or as part of a ‘premium’ services package.
“What I mostly like about WPMU DEV is their quick chat support. I have many websites in their system and in numerous times I have experienced issues that are not even related to their product and they have always provided exceptional support.” Giovani R
Supporting clients is vitally important to their business and yours.
It not only helps to build trust in your relationship with clients, it can also lead to additional work and new clients.
Besides, you know that clients are going to contact you after their website is built requesting your help and assistance, so you may as well turn this into a service that will pay for your time and effort.
Providing amazing support on all WordPress-related areas is what makes us a stand out business in the WordPress industry, and we extend this service to support our members’ businesses.
In a nutshell, here’s how this works…
You provide your clients with support and we provide your business with the support you need to support your clients.
You can use whatever method you like for customers to contact you for support.
Customers can contact you via your contact form, email, telephone, text message, or via The Hub Client and Live Chat if they have issues that need fixing or need some troubleshooting done on their website.
If you cannot solve their issue, you can turn to us for help on anything, any time of day or night.
We have an entire team of expert web, hosting, and software developers and engineers ready to back you up and provide you and your business with fast 24/7 expert support.
We also have an active community forum of members just like you and resources like comprehensive documentation, step-by-step tutorials, and our immense library of blog articles that you can turn to for help, additional knowledge, and solutions to every problem you will face in your business.
To access immediate help via live chat and ticketed support, and all of our resources, just log into The Hub and click on the Support link.
Provide website support to your clients with backing from our 24/7 expert support team.
Our support team works behind the scenes to help your business, so even if you are a solo developer, your clients will never know that you have a horde of experts standing behind you, ready to help you help your clients.
Start Profiting From Website Support Services
Let’s say that as part of your web development services, you charge an hourly rate for providing technical support.
Your premium website care plan could include a certain number of hours each month (e.g. 2, 4, 6 hours, etc.) of built-in and prepaid priority support which doesn’t roll over to the next month.
So, if your client needs support with any issue they are experiencing on their website, great!
They have already prepaid you for a certain amount of supports hours. If they don’t need your help or support for that month, then you’ll have built a “goodwill” bank to cover you financially during times where you may need to provide them with assistance without charge.
Website Optimization
When clients come to you asking you to make their websites go faster, you have a wonderful (and profitable) opportunity to put them on your Web Care Maintenance Plan, where you will continually optimize their site to make sure it runs as fast and efficiently as possible.
Optimizing websites for speed and performance is vitally important for many businesses, especially for sites where even the smallest increase in page loading speeds can make a significant difference to their bottom line.
In The Hub’s Performance section, you can easily set up and configure a service that will let you monitor, optimize, and improve the speed of your clients’ WordPress sites with automated scans, recommendations, caching, Gzip compression, Asset Optimization, and other performance features.
Optimize your clients’ websites from The Hub’s Performance screen.
This combines two of our most powerful and feature-rich plugins: Smush Pro, our award-winning image compression and optimization plugin for WordPress, and Hummingbird Pro, our WordPress site optimization plugin.
“We’ve improved site speed quite a bit using Smush and Hummingbird. It has saved us a ton of time compared to doing these tasks manually.” – Michael N
Start Profiting From Website Optimization Services
We recommend offering website optimization as part of a ‘premium’ services web care package.
Providing SEO Audits is not only a great way to attract new clients to your business, it also allows you to provide existing clients with a valuable maintenance service.
You can help clients improve their results by including ongoing SEO audits and reports in your Website Care packages.
These reports show ways to optimize their web pages and their content, how their site ranks on Google, how much traffic and engagement their marketing efforts are generating, and other valuable key metrics.
You can set up, configure, and automate an SEO service that lets you monitor client sites to improve their page rank and search results with testing, recommendations, improved tagging, social sharing, and other search engine optimization tools.
It’s all made possible by our powerful SmartCrawl SEO plugin in The Hub’s SEO module.
Monitor your clients’ websites for SEO issues from The Hub’s SEO screen.
You can then provide SEO reports to clients with your regular website maintenance services, or include it in a “premium” web care plan using our customizable client reports (see the next section for more details on our Reporting tool).
Use The Hub’s Reports feature and SmartCrawl to create a developer or client SEO report.
Start Profiting From SEO Reporting Services
We recommend offering SEO reports as part of a ‘premium’ services web care package.
Note: We cover how to offer SEO services (where you actually perform the work of improving a client’s website) in a separate article.
Also, depending on what you want included in your SEO report, you may need to use a combination of 3rd-party services with the tools that WPMU DEV provides.
Sending clients website reports that show them exactly what has been done on their website each month allows them to see the value of your maintenance services and is a great way to build stronger relationships with clients.
Monthly reports allow you to keep in touch on a regular basis and gives you an opportunity to reassess their needs and upsell additional services they may require.
You can fully automate this service with WPMU DEV. All you need to do is activate the service from The Hub’s Reports section…
Generate website health reports for your clients from The Hub.
You have the choice of creating basic client reports or detailed reports for developer use.
Create automated white label client and developer reports.
You can also choose which services to include in the report.
Which is perfect if you’re designing different client packages with different add-ons, like security scanning, SEO, website performance optimization, etc.
Choose which services you want to include in your client reports.
You can use the white label tools to customize and personalize your client reports.
This includes customizing the look of the report, the text sent in the email notification to clients, report generation and delivery schedules, etc.
You can fully customize your client reports.
This ‘set-and-forget’ service takes less than a minute to set up.
Once you set up and customize the report, your clients will automatically receive scheduled email notifications and be able to download their report.
We recommend including website reports in all of your website care packages.
We also recommend setting up both types of reports…
One for your clients, and a more detailed developer’s report for your business, then scheduling regular follow up calls (e.g. every month, 90 days, etc.) with your clients to discuss website performance and ways to improve their results.
Website reports provide clients with valuable information about their websites and give you opportunities to upsell additional services.
“I like that they have a group of plugins that eliminate the need for having to use multiple suppliers to get the same result.” David B
Packaging Your Website Maintenance Services
As you can see, we provide a range of options with a ton of flexibility for customization, allowing you to create different service levels or packages for your website maintenance services offering.
Here, for example, is a simple way you could create a website care plan with “Basic” and “Premium” packages:
Create different website care plans to suit different pricing points and client needs.
Start Building Your Website Maintenance Services With WPMU DEV Today
We provide all the tools and the support you need, backed by a 200+ strong global team of experts in all things WordPress.
If you’re already a member, then great! Follow this guide and add your website maintenance services module to your web development business today.
If you’re not a member yet, choose one of our membership plans to get started. If you’re interested in giving our platform a try, our free plan is the best place to start.
It includes unlimited site management, built-in billing, plugins, and more.
In our previous blog posts, we explained the various ways that ClickHouse can use S3 object storage. To keep things simple we generally focused on single-node operation. However, ClickHouse often runs in a cluster, and cluster operation poses some interesting questions regarding S3 usage. They include parallelizing data load across nodes, benefits of horizontal vs. vertical scaling, and avoiding unnecessary replication.
In this article, we will discuss how ClickHouse clusters can be used with S3 efficiently thanks to two important new features: the ‘s3Cluster‘ table function and zero-copy replication. We hope our description will pave the way for more ClickHouse users to exploit scalable, inexpensive object storage in their deployments.
So you have multiple data sources and most of your data has ended up in the cloud, or will soon. It’s a mix of structured and unstructured, static and streaming, in many different formats, and often fractured across data warehouses, open source databases, proprietary databases, data lakes, document stores and object storage like Amazon S3. How best to unify access to that data and share it with internal and external applications and users to support the ever-widening variety of analytical and operational use cases?
It sounds challenging, but there are several solutions. One option is to try and consolidate all the data by moving it into a monolithic (or yet another) database, cloud warehouse or data lake. But this is often impractical, time-consuming, and likely to increase cost, effort, and vendor lock-in. Let’s face it, adding another vendor to the mix is not high on the CIO’s to-do list.
It’s been a huge few months for Snapshot. We’ve completely overhauled how he backs up your data (hello, incrementals!), introduced the first of our new third-party storage destinations, and began the integration of hosting backups. So many improvements and still much more to come…
As far as backup plugins go, Snapshot was already pretty darn good.
However, with the recently launched Version 4.0, we’ve seriously raised the bar.
In fact, we’ve rebuilt Snapshot from the ground up to ensure that:
Your backups are streamlined and efficient, and don’t bloat the server by storing unnecessary files and data.
You have full control of your backups, can run them to your own schedule, and store them externally in third-party storage solutions that you trust.
You can manage and restore your backups from a simple interface and download copies at the touch of a button.
Read on to get a taste of what’s new with Snapshot, as well as a couple of sneaky insights of what’s to come:
After all, if you only change 1% of your site, what’s the point of backing up the other 99% every time?
No longer will you have duplicate upon duplicate of your site taking up all of your WPMU DEV Cloud storage space.
Snapshot will make one full backup and then proceed to back up only the new changes you make.
Subsequent backups will be far smaller in size than your base backup.
This will save you storage space as your backups will be much smaller and less likely to run into issues. It will also prevent excess strain on the server!
Better yet, the complete overhaul of Snapshot means backups are now API-driven and most of the heavy lifting is on our servers rather than your site!
We’re on a mission to make sure Snapshot integrates with every backup destination you’ll ever need.
Amazon S3 is just the first of many third-party storage solutions that will be coming your way.
Complete with a set of S3 compatible storage options, Amazon S3 is now available as a backup destination.
The first set of S3 compatible destinations we’ve added are Backblaze, DigitalOceanSpace, Wasabi, and GoogleCloud. Setup guides for each of these destinations can be found in our documentation.
Google Drive, FTP, Microsoft Azure, and Dropbox are coming in future updates, as well as the ability to add any S3 compatible destination!
View Your WPMU DEV Hosting Backups in Snapshot
Another of Snapshot’s exciting new features sees the addition of all of your WPMU DEV hosting backups within their very own dashboard.
See all your hosting backups at a glance within Snapshot.
You can view the details of your hosting backups as well as download a copy.
If you want to manage your backups, you can just click the Manage link which will take you to The Hub.
You can view the details of your last 30 hosting backups.
Hosting backups now have their own widget in the main dashboard too.
View all your Snapshot and hosting backups in one place.
Our devs are working hard on taking the integration with hosting backup a step further.
In a future release, you’ll be able to fully manage your hosting backups with Snapshot.
This means you can create manual hosting backups from Snapshot, as well as restoring to a hosting backup of your choice.
At the moment, this can all be done through Snapshot’s integration with The Hub, but we’re aiming to turn Snapshot into an all-in-one tool for managing all of your backups.
Protect Your Staging Site
We believe that backing up your staging is just as important as backing up your live site.
Snapshot now comes with the ability to back up your staging site, meaning you’ll never be at risk of losing all your hard work.
Your backups will be handled just like they are on your live site. You’ll be able to view them all within its sleek dashboard and easily restore your staging site to a previous version in a couple of clicks.
Make manual backups or even set a schedule, just as you would in your live site.
New Automate Integration
Ever updated your plugins or theme to find that there is a compatibility issue, and wished you could take your site back to right before the update?
Snapshot and Automate’s integration solves this problem.
Us too!
That’s why we introduced Snapshot to Automate and created the dream team when it comes to updating safely!
If you’re not familiar with Automate, he’s the perfect guy to be left in charge of your plugin and theme updates.
Automate will check for new updates at an interval of your choosing, and the icing on the cake is that when he’s linked with Snapshot, you can enable automatic pre-update backups.
If you host with us, this will be taken care of within your hosting backups.
If you don’t host with us, Automate will take a full backup of your site before updates are installed. You’ll be able to view and manage this backup through Snapshot’s dashboard.
Automate’s backups will be ahem…automated, so you don’t have to worry about backing up before updates.
Snapshot will store a maximum of 30 Automate backups before removing the oldest one from archives. This will come out of your WPMU DEV cloud storage allowance, but will not affect any of your other backups.
What’s Next?
Snapshot Pro has just had lots of awesome updates, however, our work is never done.
Our overall aim is always to offer plugins and services that you, our loyal members, want to see and use.
Our awesome developers are always eager to turn your ideas and suggestions into reality, which is why they are hard at work on the next batch of releases.
Over the next few months, you can expect to see more backup destinations (including Google Drive and Dropbox), the option to choose how many backups you keep, the ability to manage your hosting backups from Snapshot, along with updates to security, and white labeling capabilities.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is well-known for its vast number of product offerings. There are (probably) a few AWS ninjas who know exactly how and when to use which Amazon product for what because they've earned this certification. The rest of us are in need of help.
Specifically in the storage arena, AWS provides three popular services — S3, Elastic Block Store (EBS), and Elastic File System (EFS) — which work quite differently and offer different levels of performance, cost, availability, and scalability. We'll discuss the use cases of these storage options, and compare their performance, cost, and accessibility to stored data. But before diving in, you can also try out this free AWS storage skills assessment to see how your "IQ" stacks up against your peers.
Over the last decade, the volume and variety of data and data storage technologies have been soaring. Businesses in every industry have been looking for cost-effective ways to store it, and storage has been one of the main requirements for data retention. With a change to [near] real-time data pipelines and growing adoption of Apache Kafka, companies must find ways to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of their data platform.
Currently, Kafka is configured with a shorter, and typically three days, retention period. Data, older than the retention period, is copied, via streaming data pipelines, to scalable external storage for long-term use like AWS S3 or Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).
The files you upload to CodePen with our PRO Asset Hosting feature have a public URL you can access them at. You might recognize a URL like this, that we used to give you:
Or you might recognize that URL as being a direct URL to an Amazon S3 bucket. While that works, it’s not ideal for a couple of reasons:
S3 isn’t a CDN. It’s the right place for asset storage, but not direct asset delivery. For one thing, notice the “us-west” in the URL. That’s OK for me literally being in the west of the U.S., but worse and worse of a choice the farther you are away. Rachel in Queensland, Australia didn’t exactly have fast assets.
CORS issues. S3 can have a “bucket policy” that sets CORS headers, and we absolutely did that and it worked for the most part, but there was a really tricky little issue that could cache the asset with missing CORS headers and cause people grief.
So, we’re now serving up assets from a new URL, like this:
https://assets.codepen.io/1/your-file.jpg
Here’s what that transition is like:
Now…
The files are served from a global CDN, meaning everyone will get them much faster.
We can ensure the files are served with the right CORS headers no matter what.
This unlocks some additional cool features we’ll be making available soon, so stay tuned.
Do I have to do anything?
No. If you want to take advantage of this, you can update your “old” URLs to this new format, but you don’t have to, the old URLs will work fine forever.
We might ultimately update those URLs for you, just because it’s purely better.
One day I faced the problem with downloading a relatively large binary data file from PostgreSQL. There are several limitations to store and fetch such data (all restrictions could be found in official documentation). To resolve the problem it was suggested to find more suitable data storage.
For some internal reasons well known Amazon S3 bucket was chosen for this purpose. The choice affected the project's unit test base. It's still not possible to continue using light-weighted databases such as HSQL or H2 to implement tests. It is a key problem which we will try to resolve in this article.
Before we get down to the brass tacks, it’s helpful to quickly list out what the specific benefits we want an ideal data lake to deliver. These would be:
The ability to collect any form of data, from anywhere within an enterprise’s numerous data sources and silos. From revenue numbers to social media streams, and anything in between.
Reduce the effort needed to analyze or process the same data set for different purposes by different applications.
Keep the whole operation cost efficient, with the ability to scale up storage and compute capacities as required, and independent of each other.
And with those requirements in mind, let’s see how to set up a data lake with AWS
There are many factors that need to be taken into consideration when developing an Android application. Developing an interface to handle queries on the server-side is one of the most important steps. Server-side state management is responsible for handling many different tasks, such as user authentication, serving content such as images or data and communication with a centralized database.
Amazon S3 is an aspect of Amazon Web Services that can help with server-side app management by providing object storage features to handle these queries. It has a number of libraries, databases, and cloud computing features that will assist you.
Most applications today serve users across the globe and need a way to deliver their content fast. To accomplish this, developers often rely on a Content Delivery Network (CDN), a network of servers that are geographically distributed with the intent of serving content to users as fast as possible.
Amazon CloudFront is one such CDN. In this article, I will describe how to upload files to S3 bucket and serve those files through CloudFront in Node.js.
For global manufacturing enterprises or other industries that rely on automated machinery across locations, the ability to keep tabs on asset performance becomes crucial. While manual supervision has worked well in such scenarios, there is a definite opportunity to optimize costs here. That's by enabling virtual monitoring and logging of asset performance data.
Our team recently built a solution for this use case using machine learning solutions from AWS. It was designed to remotely capture video on machine performance and create logs of when the asset/machine was in operation and for how long.
To learn about the current and future state of databases, we spoke with and received insights from 19 IT professionals. We asked, "How can companies get a handle on the vast amounts of data they’re collecting?"Here’s what they shared with us:
Ingest
It’s incredibly important to ingest, store, and present it for querying. We have a lambda architecture for in-memory processing, streaming, analytics, and then very scalable data at rest for historical data. When people struggle, they’ve figured out one piece of the puzzle. They may be able to ingest data quickly, but they are not able to analyze the data and get insights. It’s all about being able to capture the data and then do valuable things with it at the same time.
Have an Agile data architecture. We have perfected the collection of data with data ingestion solutions like Spark and Kinesis. But there are still a lot of challenges remaining in analyzing and operationalizing the data. There is not enough scale and investment going on in those two areas. Focus on concepts like federated query. Data can reside anywhere. Optimize compute to understand where the data lives so you can produce fast results. Data labs give people their own sandbox to work on data that exists and bring compute to where the data resides.
We handle data at a high level with governance based on where data is coming from, it’s structure, and where it’s going. With things like GDPR, this has become more important. Ingesting data streaming in real-time is key. Stream-based ingestions with volume and noise are increasing. Bring in other technologies like Kafka to ingest. Multiplatform offer “horses for courses.”
Query
The data management problem is solved with an overarching data management solution. Consider what data needs to be stored, for how long and at what granularity. For example, in banking, with mobile access, a lot of customers look at their balances when they are bored. Because we’re in-memory we can cache balance information so it’s cheap and easy for customers to get to.
Be able to securely store large amounts of data. Companies are using the cloud to do this because they do not have to pre-provision resources. They typically store this data in object stores like Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. The second challenge is to derive value from these data sets; much of the value stays inaccessible because there is no way to query the raw data. A developer has to massage the data using various data pipelines before he/she can unlock the value of this data, and this transformation typically uses its own custom APIs. Databases make it easy to query these data sets. Databases associate a schema with the data, either at read time or write time, and make it accessible by a developer via a very standard query language like SQL. New-age databases can continuously ingest data from cloud services, like Amazon S3, Google Cloud or DynamoDB, and make it queryable via standard SQL. This makes it easier for a developer to extract value from large sets of data.
1) Auditing is probably the first step. Understand what the data is, its origin, and destination. Then marry this with the overall strategy as the business and figure out whether vital data exists, whether it should be archived or whether it needs enrichment to produce meaningful data. 2) In a previous life, the first task was to run tools that would scan the network and find instances of running databases. In some cases, customers had several copies of the same data being processed by different systems costing vast amounts in infrastructure and resources. No one was using this data. This goes back to designing databases with a purpose in mind. 3) Stream Processing can play a huge part. Being able to validate, classify and enrich data, you can add context and meaning. That way you can determine how much value it may have to you. Stream processing enables organization and context, which in turn enables understanding.
Active analytics platform enables clients to handle data and access streaming and historical data using SQL queries. We are now able to involve graph relationship queries, also recognize the opportunity to use trained ML algorithms to run against the active analytics database.
Other
Delete it as fast as you possibly can. The types of customers that can and cannot delete data vary by industry. Healthcare, aerospace, finance must preserve data. Are you going to archive? Real-time, or near-time available? Do you put it in a warehouse? Is the database transactional? How up to date does the data need to be? Real-time, near real time? Balance a transactional system at run time against the analytics customers want to run. RDBMS or Elk stack? A database is a tool, don’t abuse it. Have a strategy around the data, long-term and short-term problems to address. Get it right early or it just gets more difficult.
Be more intelligent about how you will use the data to do novel things. Accelerate database releases to provide knowledge to the business more quickly. Be smart about equipping the right individuals to have control over their destiny. People are moving away from the monolith. Choose the right technology based on what you are trying to achieve. There are more tools today with greater specialization. Let teams chase after and test different solutions so they benefit from processing all of this.
It’s a challenging task to get a handle on data collection, but it’s even more challenging to provide data access. Database technologies, such as data indexing, data normalizing, and data warehousing, allow companies to systematically store and retrieve data as efficiently and effectively as possible.
If you collect meaningful data that you expect to be able to sort, categorize and report form it should be stored in a database! And your database strategy will be key to your operational efficiency.
Databases are part of the solution. Choose a data storage product based on how to get the data in and how to query it. In terms of value, it comes down to how much you need to scale out to avoid performance hits. There’s vertical and horizontal scaling. Traditional vertical databases scale well. Now the more horizontal is scaling as well. Cost is an issue. If you host in a public cloud a lot of licensing headaches are removed because the cloud vendor has worked out the details. It’s much easier to adopt a database service because you don’t have to provision hardware.
Traceability, lineage, governance are key. The graph model is able to represent the open-ended complex pictures using nodes and relationships in a node model. Keep track of meta lineage but all the different identifiers for the individual, his devices, and identities. We are seeing the rise of the chief data officer and governance with GDPR and California initiative. Not unlike a data warehouse where you get the data you need based on the requirements you have. See how pieces of data correlate across the entire enterprise. What kind of data pieces do you want to see correlated and what kind of relationships do you want to discover?
Many companies need to have a better/more accurate understanding of how they expect their data to scale and what the projected growth rate is going to be. Granted, it can be hard to get perfectly right. (You might start with a small environment, get customers faster than anticipated, and blow out projections.) But make sure you have a way to understand what data you are collecting and what the volume is going to be – from the beginning! – cannot be overstressed. With Apache Cassandra, for example, it’s fairly easy to scale, but it’s not particularly fast to do so. You need to plan deployment with enough runway…if you hit limits, you’re going to have problems.
Although we are built to handle and scale high volumes of data, one of the first steps is always to get a clear picture of which data points are really important. The value of data is also changing with the location (e.g. cloud vs. edge) and over time. Exploring and learning from (and with) the data is an important part of ongoing success.
Use data platforms that allow you to work naturally with data of any shape or structure in its native form without having to constantly wrangle with a rigid schema. The ability to scale out on commodity infrastructure and do it across geographic regions to accommodate massive increases in data volume.
That’s why we developed a platform to handle the scale and diversity of data. Edge to cloud is a common use case with initial processing at the edge and then moving the data to data centers. Once the data is in a central location that’s where you can do ML, come up with models, and push insight back to the edge. When you have datasets like that, that’s where the database and streaming fits in with fast streaming and fast processing you need a platform with different data services to meet all of your needs.
Here are the contributors of insight, knowledge, and experience:
