What happens to a website after it goes live

The day a site goes live feels like the finish line. It isn't. It's the day the site starts needing things, and most of those things are invisible right up until they aren't.

What breaks on its own

Nothing on a website stays put. Here's what moves.

The certificate expires. The padlock in the browser comes from a certificate that has to be renewed every few months. When it lapses, visitors get a full-screen warning that your site isn't safe. Most of them leave. Some of them assume you've closed.

The software goes stale. The system behind your site gets updates, and some of those updates close security holes. The site nobody updates is the one that gets broken into, and a broken-into site ends up pushing spam or sending your customers somewhere ugly.

The domain lapses. Domains renew once a year. The reminder goes to an address nobody checks, the card on file has expired, and one morning the site is just gone. Getting a lapsed domain back ranges from annoying to impossible.

The server has a bad day. Servers restart. Disks fill up. Something upstream breaks. If nobody is watching, the first person to notice your site is down is a customer.

Something gets deleted. Someone changes the wrong thing, or the host has a bad week. Without a backup there's nothing to go back to.

None of this is dramatic. It's maintenance, like a furnace filter. It just happens to be the kind nobody sees until it fails.

What "hosting" should mean

When I say I keep a site online, I mean a specific list:

• The site lives on a server I manage.
• The certificate renews itself, and I hear about it if it doesn't.
• The site is backed up automatically, so there's always a copy to go back to.
• Something checks that the site is up, around the clock, and tells me when it isn't.
• Security updates get applied.

That's the floor. It's why the plan is monthly, and it's why even the cheapest plan isn't free.

What changes because of you

Then there's the other kind of upkeep, the kind you cause. New hours. A new service. A price change. A photo of the new truck.

Each one is small, but they add up, and there are two honest ways to handle them. Pay per edit, which is fine if you change things twice a year. Or pick a plan that includes a few edits a month, which is cheaper if you change things more often than that. Most people change things more often than they think they do.

The question to ask whoever builds your site

"What happens after it goes live?"

If the answer is a shrug, or a hosting account in your name that you've never logged into, then you're the one maintaining it. That's a fine answer as long as you know it going in. Most people find out later.