Website maintenance cost in Ghana: what you should pay monthly

What maintenance actually includes

Maintenance is the work that keeps a website working after the person who built it has moved on to the next one. Most of it is invisible when it is done and expensive when it is not.

Hosting and SSL. The server the site runs on and the certificate that puts the padlock in the browser. Certificates expire. When one does, every visitor sees a security warning instead of your site, and most of them leave.

Security updates. Every website runs on software, and software has vulnerabilities found in it every week. Updates close them. A site nobody updates is a site that will eventually be broken into, not because anyone targeted it but because automated scanners find unpatched software by the thousand.

Backups. A copy of the site and its data, taken on a schedule, stored somewhere other than the server it came from, and tested so it actually restores. A backup that has never been restored is a hope, not a backup.

Monitoring. Something that notices the site is down before a customer tells you on WhatsApp. Uptime checks are cheap and they turn a weekend outage into a ten minute one.

Small changes. A phone number that changed, a new team member, a price update, a broken link. The allowance for these is what stops every small edit becoming a new invoice or a two week wait.

What it should cost

Our three care plans, monthly, with what each includes. They are read from the price list so they cannot differ from it.

Why one guide says GHS 1,500 a month

Faciotech's cost guide recommends GHS 1,500 a month for hosting and maintenance. That figure is not wrong for what it describes, which is a WordPress site with a stack of plugins, each needing its own updates and compatibility checks, on hosting that has to be managed by hand. Maintaining that is genuinely a few hours a month of somebody's time.

The reason our Essential plan is GHS 299 rather than GHS 1,500 is that the sites we build do not need that much maintaining. A site with no plugin stack, on hosting that patches itself, with a build that fails if something is broken, takes an hour a month to keep healthy rather than five. We would rather charge for the hour than for the five.

The honest caveat is that if you already have a WordPress site with thirty plugins, the higher figure may be what it costs to keep it alive. That is also an argument for not having one, which is part of how we price a rebuild.

What happens when nobody does it

The failure is never dramatic on day one. It is a certificate that expires on a Sunday. A form that quietly stops sending, discovered a month later when somebody asks why there have been no enquiries. A plugin update that was never applied, then a scanner that found it, then a page of pharmaceutical adverts where your homepage used to be, and your domain on a blocklist.

The cost of a hacked site is not the cleanup, though that is real. It is the two weeks of visitors seeing a warning, the Google ranking that dropped and takes months to recover, and the customers who searched your name, saw the warning and went elsewhere without telling you.

This is the post that answers the question every business owner with a dead site eventually asks, which is where the person who built it went. The answer is that they were never paid to stay. A care plan is what paying them to stay looks like, and at GHS 299 a month it is cheaper than one rebuild.

Questions to ask before paying anyone for maintenance

Whether it is us or anyone else.

• What exactly is included, written down. A monthly fee with no list attached is a fee for nothing in particular.
• Who owns the hosting account and the domain. If the answer is the maintainer, you cannot leave without losing the site.
• When was the last backup taken, and when was one last restored. The second question is the one that matters.
• What happens if the site goes down at 9pm on a Saturday. A specific answer means there is a process. A vague one means there is not.
• Can I cancel, and what do I keep. The right answer is thirty days notice and you keep everything.
• How much does a full rebuild cost if this goes wrong. It anchors the maintenance fee against the alternative. Our rebuild prices are published, and we wrote up what a website costs in Ghana so the comparison is easy to make.