Website Hosting & Maintenance

There are several key reasons that our Hosting & Maintenance plans are almost always the best choice for your newly created website:

• Most low-cost hosting plans offered by other providers are variations of "shared hosting", meaning the provider puts as many as thousands of website hosting accounts on the same server. This can often lead to very slow loading speeds for your website at times of the day when the number of visitors to other websites on your server is high. On our server, we host far fewer websites than these shared hosting solutions, creating a much more stable, reliable, and consistent hosting environment for your website with virtually no slow loading times due to high server usage.
• Most hosting plans offered by other companies include strictly traditional hosting, meaning you'll receive server space on the internet for your website to live on, but no website-level features are included. With our Hosting & Maintenance plans, we include some level of website maintenance and care as well, giving you peace of mind that we've got our eye on your website AND the server it lives on. Please see the features of our plans above for more details on the ways we can manage and care for your website.
• Those who subscribe to a Hosting & Maintenance plan with us receive a discounted hourly rate (detailed at the time of hosting commencement) for website change requests in the future.
• Subscribing to a Hosting & Maintenance plan with us keeps all of your communication regarding your website with one company, making support and troubleshooting more efficient for both of us.

You definitely do not have to choose us to host and maintain a website that we created for you. Your website is yours and you can choose to host with a third party if you like. However, we highly recommend reviewing the benefits to using one of our Hosting & Maintenance plans instead of hosting with a third party in the answer to the previous question ("Why should I choose Sryde to host my website?")

E-Commerce and Membership websites are far more complex than static/unchanging Informational Websites, as they they have dynamic functions, take up more disk space, use more processing power, and are more error prone. Therefore, hosting and performing maintenance on these websites normally takes more time and more resources, hence the higher price points.

The Host + Protect + Improve plan is designed to include small changes that you request when needed while you enjoy a predictable inclusive monthly fee. It is not designed for our time to be accumulated and then used all at once to perform larger requested website additions or changes. Therefore, unused minutes in any month do not roll over to the next month and are lost. Considering that the difference in price of this plan relative to the Host + Protect plan is only about half of our hourly rate, we feel that this is a very fair way to present a plan that allows consistent monthly payments.

The plans here mainly include services to host, protect, secure, and maintain the technical aspects of your website. These services do not directly impact or improve your website's search engine rankings. If you are interested in high rankings on Google to obtain website traffic, see our Search Engine Optimization plans.

We can definitely provide you with access to your hosting account if you'd like. We use a Linux/cPanel setup so we can provide you with cPanel access. Please note though that our Hosting & Maintenance plans are designed to be 'full service' solutions in the sense that we will handle all aspects of hosting settings and configurations for you (PHP upgrades, PHP ini limits, disk space, and so on). So unless you are a techie and want to set up a special configuration, there's almost never a need for you to have direct access to your cPanel account.

Although we allow you to have administrative access of your hosting account and hosted website, we do place some limitations on what you are permitted to do for security and/or cost-controlling purposes. Also note that our plans are more than traditional hosting plans which typically only provide you with hosting space—all include some level of website-level monitoring, maintenance or care as well, therefore we enforce website limitations too, as follows:

• We only permit WordPress websites to be hosted with us
• You are only permitted to have 1 website on each hosting account
• We require a WordPress user with administrative privileges be active for Sryde developers at all times
• We will monitor your website for plug-ins that you may install yourself, and we reserve the right to disallow plug-ins that do not meet our security standards
• We require that certain plug-ins must always remain installed and active on your website for security and maintenance purposes. This list changes from time to time and we can share it with you upon request if desired.
• If your website has such high traffic that it is using an inordinate amount of our server's resources, or if it is sending more than 2000 emails/month to yourself or your customers with confirmations or notifications, we may require that something be done about that (either a higher fee or a change to the website). In the rare instance that these limits are reached, we will reach out to you to inform you of the high usage and discuss an amicable solution together.

We do not offer hosted email accounts/inboxes. This is because the technical requirements needed to host email inboxes and ensure confident delivery of email messages has become significantly different than the technology needed to host, secure, and ensure proper functionality of websites, so we decided to 'double down' on website hosting technology and stop offering hosted email accounts for clients. We recommend using a dedicated email provider, such as Google WorkSpace, or a cheaper yet still email-dedicated alternative such as PolarisMail for your email needs.

Regarding cancellations: you can cancel anytime by providing written or emailed cancellation notice at least 30 days before your next billing date (whether that date is monthly, quarterly, or annually). Please note that cancelling your plan early will not entitle you to a refund for the remainder of the term already paid for. Further, if you cancel, it will be your responsibility to move your website to your new hosting provider (alternatively, we can do this for you, but our plans do not cover this work and we will need to bill you for our time to do so). Regarding refunds: We are not able to offer refunds on these plans regardless of your payment term length.

For these plans you can pay on either an annual or monthly basis.

• If you choose to pay annually, you can pay via credit card, e-transfer, or mailed check.
• If you choose to pay monthly, payments must be made via pre-authorized credit card automatic charges (we will need to keep your credit card on file and charge it each month).

It depends. Firstly, your website must be a WordPress website as we only host and deal with WordPress websites. Then, we have to audit how your website was built including auditing your plug-ins to see if it meets our security standards. If we determine that your website fits our bill, then yes, we can move it to our server and you can subscribe to one of our Hosting & Maintenance plans.