I’m excited to announce our new website maintenance and support contracts!
Over several years of working with many technical and business leaders, I’ve found that codebases that get too stale become increasingly risky.
Fresh Code Is Better
By “stale” I mean codebases where no one does any of the following things regularly: builds, updates, tests, audits, fixes, or add features. Your codebase needs regular maintenance and support to ensure it can overcome the risks of being live on the internet.
Most business leaders think of the internet as a great opportunity for growth, which it is, but there are also many risks online! One of the most common risks is an open source package reaching its end-of-life (i.e. no one is supporting it with security and functionality updates). We use open source packages of code to drastically reduce the cost of building web assets, but they must be updated from time to time. Just because your codebase works now, doesn’t mean it will continue to work indefinitely without regular attention.
Let’s Dispense With The Hypotheticals
An example of this happened just a couple months ago. One of our clients let their codebase get stale while focusing on other aspects of their business. After a while, their marketing team needed some changes for a campaign launch. We jumped in to help them accomplish their business goal, but quickly found that their codebase would no longer build because the version of PHP (a programming language) had reached its end of life. What could have cost as little as $500 ended up costing around $5,000.
Other risks may include malicious attacks by nefarious individuals or state actors. Just last year, the city where I reside had a ransomware attack that cost them $1 million dollars! Had they had a support contract with regular security audits and code/data backups correctly, they could have walked away with very little work from the good guys instead of handing over a large payment to fund the bad guys.
The Solution Is In The Plan
To better serve our clients, we thought long and hard about website maintenance and support packages that would keep our client’s codebases up to date and lower the risks online. I highly recommend signing up for one of the paid plans. They’ll save you money in the long run and help ensure that we’re ready to help in the event of an emergency.
Let me know if you’d like to get started or have any questions.
