Compare responsibility, not labels
Managed Website Care Buyer’s Guide
Use clear questions to compare hosting, maintenance and management offers without assuming every monthly plan includes the same work.
Hosting and infrastructure
Hosting is the environment. Management is the responsibility for operating the website inside it.
- Who owns the hosting account and domain registration?
- What availability or response commitment is actually written into the plan?
- Are staging, caching, CDN and SSL configuration included?
- What happens when resource limits or traffic patterns change?
- Can the site be exported or migrated without proprietary lock-in?
Apply it: Ask the provider to describe the exact handoff process if the relationship ends.
Backups, security and recovery
A backup claim is only useful when restoration responsibility and verification are clear.
- How often are backups created and how long are they retained?
- Are backups stored separately from the live website?
- Who verifies that a backup can be restored?
- What malware, firewall and access controls are included?
- Which recovery actions require approval or an additional fee?
Apply it: Request the provider’s written recovery boundary, including what evidence is needed before a restore or rollback.
Labour, changes and support
The word managed can hide very different labour allowances and response expectations.
- How much implementation or content labour is included each month?
- What counts as maintenance versus a scoped project?
- How are urgent, after-hours and third-party problems handled?
- Are plugin, theme and platform updates tested before production?
- How are requests, decisions and completed work documented?
Apply it: Compare plans using an included/excluded/approval-required table rather than a feature-count table.
Use boundary: This guide is educational. It is not a site audit, legal opinion, security certification, ranking guarantee or promise that a specific change will produce leads or revenue.