Terms of Service

These terms apply to our Hosting and Maintenance Plans. When you accept a quote from us, you accept these terms. They are written to be read, not to be impressive.

1. What we do

We host your website and keep it maintained. This page sets out what that includes, what it does not, what each of us is responsible for, and how either of us can end it.

2. Included in every plan

• Hosting on our platform, with an SSL certificate kept valid and renewed
• Daily backups, retained and restorable
• The software your site runs on kept updated, patched and checked afterwards. On a WordPress site that means core, themes and plugins
• Malware scanning, with anything found dealt with
• Security hardening and performance configuration, maintained over time
• If something breaks while we are looking after your site, fixing it is included. That covers anything caused by an update we applied, by the hosting, or by our own work. It does not come out of your change credits

Where that line sits. Two things are different from the above, and we will always tell you which one applies rather than quietly billing you. Faults that were already there when you joined us are not breakages, they are fixes, and we will quote or use credits for those. Damage caused by changes you or a third party made without telling us is covered in section 5.

3. What your plan adds

*Gold turnaround applies during standard working days.

Every website rebuild we carry out includes three months of Silver at no charge.

Sites that are not standard website builds. These plans are priced around a conventional website. If your site is a bespoke application, or is built on something that needs specialist upkeep, we will agree in writing what maintaining it involves before your plan starts, and price it accordingly. We will not quietly leave parts of it unmaintained, and we will not pretend a plan covers work it does not.

4. How change credits work

One credit is 15 minutes of work. Credits cover small changes you want made: text edits, image swaps, adding a page, updating prices, small additions and tweaks. They are for changes, not for repairs: if something breaks on our watch, that is covered by the plan itself, as set out in section 2.

• Unused credits roll over, up to three times your monthly allowance
• Time beyond your credits is charged at our standard hourly rate of £65 per hour, and we will always tell you before anything extra is charged
• Larger pieces of work are quoted separately before anything starts. Nothing is ever billed to you without being agreed first
• Where a job is bigger than one month’s allowance, we will normally break it into monthly pieces rather than quote for it, and tell you which piece is happening when

5. Not included

• Building a new website, or redesigning the existing one
• Writing content, taking photographs, or producing video
• Paid advertising, and the management of it
• Third party licences and subscriptions bought in your name, such as premium plugins, components or stock images
• Handling or storing payment card details. Anything involving card data has to be scoped separately, because it brings PCI DSS obligations that change the shape of the work
• Fixing damage caused by changes made by you or by a third party without telling us

6. What we need from you

• Access to whatever we need to do the work, kept current
• Content, images and answers when a job depends on them, otherwise that month’s work may stall
• Telling us before you or anyone else changes the site, so we are not diagnosing a problem we could have avoided
• Making sure you have the right to use any content and images you supply

7. Paying for it

• Your monthly fee is the figure on your quote
• Nothing is charged for moving your site onto our hosting. That work is part of the plan
• Nothing is charged for the part month your site goes live in. Your first invoice covers your first full calendar month on the plan, and goes out at the start of it
• Plans are billed monthly in advance. Each invoice covers the month ahead and is issued at the beginning of that month
• Payment is by Direct Debit, set up once through GoCardless
• Any one-off work quoted alongside your plan is payable in advance unless we agree otherwise in writing
• We will give you at least 30 days notice in writing before any change to the monthly fee

8. Ending it

• This runs month to month. There is no minimum term and no tie-in
• Either of us can end it with 30 days notice, by email
• If you leave, you leave with everything: a full copy of your website files and database, your domain moved wherever you want it, and any accounts we set up in your name transferred to you. We do not hold anything back
• Anything already invoiced remains payable. We do not refund part months

9. Who owns what

• Your website, your content, your data and your domain are yours. They stay yours throughout and afterwards
• Where we write bespoke code for your site, you are free to keep using it on that site after this agreement ends

10. What we can and cannot promise

• We take daily backups and test that they restore. We cannot promise that no data will ever be lost
• We monitor uptime and act on outages. We cannot promise the site will never be down, because parts of that sit with our upstream provider and with the wider internet
• We keep the site patched and scanned. No amount of hardening makes any website impossible to attack, so we cannot promise it will never be compromised. If it is, getting it back up is included, not extra

Limit on what we are liable for. Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. Subject to that, our total liability to you in any twelve month period is limited to the fees you paid us in that period. We are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of goodwill, or losses that were not reasonably foreseeable when you accepted our quote.

11. Your data, and data protection

In hosting and maintaining your website we act as a data processor and you act as the data controller, as those terms are used in UK GDPR. This section is our processor agreement with you.

• What we process: whatever personal data your website holds or collects. Typically that is enquiry form submissions, and any customer or user accounts your site keeps. The people it relates to are your customers and website visitors
• Why, and for how long: only in order to host, maintain, back up and support your website, for as long as your plan runs
• Our instructions: we process personal data only on your documented instructions, unless the law requires otherwise, in which case we will tell you before we do it if we are allowed to
• Confidentiality: anyone who has access to your data is bound to keep it confidential
• Security: we keep appropriate technical and organisational measures in place, including hardening, malware scanning, encrypted transfer and tested backups
• Sub-processors: we use hosting and infrastructure providers to deliver the service. We remain responsible to you for what they do, and we will tell you before adding or changing one, so you can object
• Helping you: we will help you respond to requests from individuals exercising their rights, and with any assessments or consultations you have to carry out
• Breaches: if there is a personal data breach affecting your data, we will tell you without undue delay and give you what you need to meet your own obligations
• At the end: when your plan ends we hand your data over, and delete our copies once you confirm you have everything
• Showing our working: we will give you the information you reasonably need to satisfy yourself we are meeting these obligations

We do not sell your data, share it, or use it for anything other than doing this job.

12. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.