Care plan vs maintenance vs hosting: what's the difference?

They answer three different questions. Where does the site live? That's hosting. Who keeps it healthy every month? That's a care plan. Who fixes it when something's wrong right now? That's maintenance.

The confusion comes from the overlap. Some hosts include backups. Some care plans include hosting. Some maintenance providers offer monthly retainers. So look at what's actually included, not the name on the invoice.

Hosting is the service that stores your website and serves it to visitors. Managed hosting adds the parts most businesses don't want to think about: an SSL certificate, a content delivery network so pages load quickly everywhere, backups and uptime monitoring.

Hosting keeps the site online. It doesn't usually update your software, change your content or fix a broken form.

A care plan is monthly looking-after: updates, backups with tested restores, uptime and security monitoring, a monthly health check, and a set allowance of small changes. Hosting may be included or optional.

It suits businesses that change their site often, or don't want to think about it at all.

Maintenance is one-off work: fixing a broken form, speeding up slow pages, updating content, sorting security warnings, adding redirects after a redesign, or rescuing a site whose developer has gone quiet. You pay per job.

It suits sites with a problem right now, including ones built by someone else.

Answer these five questions in order.

1. 1Is your site online and secure on hosting you trust? If not, sort hosting first. Everything else sits on top of it.
2. 2Does the site bring in enquiries or sales? If yes, downtime costs money, so monitoring and backups matter.
3. 3Do you change the site more than once or twice a year? If yes, a care plan's changes allowance usually works out simpler than paying per job.
4. 4Is the site built on a platform with lots of plugins or regular updates? If yes, a care plan keeps it patched.
5. 5Is something broken right now? Book maintenance for the fix, then decide whether a care plan would stop it happening again.

Yes, and it's often easier. One provider means one person to message, no arguing between your host and your developer about whose problem it is, and someone who knows the whole set-up.