How it works
Four stages. Each one says what we do, what we need from you, and roughly how long it takes. Nothing starts without your say-so, and nothing is billed that you haven't agreed to in writing.
We get into the actual system — the server, the site, the plugins, the logs — and work out what's really going on. You end up with a written recommendation: what's wrong, what it would take to fix, and what that costs.
That document is yours. If you take it to another developer, it'll still be useful to them. Most people don't, but that's the point: you're paying for findings, not for a sales call.
Once you've read the recommendation, we turn the parts you want done into a written quote at a fixed price. Not an estimate that drifts — a number, against a defined list of work.
Anything that falls outside that list is quoted separately before it's started, at a stated hourly rate. If discovery turns up something genuinely unexpected — an undocumented integration, a database in worse shape than the site suggested — you hear about it the day we find it, not on the invoice.
Work happens on a staging address you can open any time — no waiting for a big reveal. For migrations, we copy files, database and email, rebuild on our Auckland server, and test before anything public changes.
We lower the DNS time-to-live ahead of the switch and schedule cutover for a quiet period. Your old site stays live while records propagate, so nobody lands on an error page mid-move. Then we reissue SSL, retest every form and redirect, and move mailboxes across with their contents.
You get every credential, a written note of what changed and why, and full access to your own hosting account. Your domain stays in your name. If you ever leave, we hand over a working copy of everything without a conversation about it.
After that it's ordinary managed hosting: we do the updates, backups, monitoring and support, billed monthly on a GST invoice with no lock-in. Small changes come out of your plan's dev time. Larger jobs get quoted the same way as stage two.
We won't hold your access hostage. Domains registered in your name, hosting account in your name, credentials handed over on request. The reason some people are nervous about a small provider is precisely this, so we've removed it as a question.
We won't quote work we think is unnecessary. If the honest answer is "your hosting is fine, you've got one bad plugin", that's the answer you'll get — even when it's the smaller invoice.