What’s the difference between hosting plans and maintenance plans?

2April 23, 2024

Hosting Plans, like our popular Siberian Plan, are services that allow a website (which is a collection of files and data) to be stored on our servers and run on our platform. If any issues arise due to our servers or hosting system, we’ll resolve this for you. This includes if our server is down, or our hosting system has settings that may be interfering with your website’s normal expected operation.

This does not mean issues arising from the website or code (plugins, themes) within it as these do not have anything to do with hosting or our server, but the files in your account, which we are not responsible for because we did not create them.

Maintenance Plans are added optional services that allow us to provide assistance in keeping WordPress core, themes, and plugins updated for you as well as other added, done-for-you features for those that want to be more hands-off with the technical aspects of their website. In a maintenance plan we cover needs arising from the files in your website if they pertain to an update performed. While we do not provide custom coding in a basic (Shield) maintenance plan, we do provide “Crash Insurance” or, in other words, if your site is completely unreachable, we will restore it to operation.

This does not mean that every time a page or a plugin is not working that we will fix it. These are isolated issues that are not the entire website but a small piece of it. When a plugin is not working or causing issues we will refer you to the plugin author for support.

Here’s some examples of when our Shield maintenance plan, our base tier maintenance package, coverage applies or doesn’t:

✅ Automatically Covered by Maintenance: None of your website pages load at all. 500 error, or 404 error.

X Not Automatically Covered by Maintenance: Your shop page is not working but your home page is and you are able to login to the site via WP Admin.

✅ Automatically Covered by Maintenance: Your admin login screen for your WordPress site is not loading.

X Not Automatically Covered by Maintenance: You get an nasty screen error when you add a product to your store.

For issues you want us to resolve outside of what is covered while in a Shield maintenance plan, you’ll likely need to receive an estimate for us to fix the issue, or hire your own developer to do so.

We do not provide coverage for issues that occur before purchase or upgrade of a maintenance plan. A maintenance plan is a subscription separate from the hosting plan and coverage applies for issues that started AFTER subscription is active.