6. Terms of Service - WordPress Maintenance & Support Print

  • WordPress, Service Terms
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6.1 WordPress Maintenance and Support

6.1.1 WordPress Maintenance

The WordPress Maintenance service is a pro-active service that is designed to work on the Net Solutions hosting platform. All software updates are scheduled and performed proactively and periodically according to your chosen plan. 

It includes the following activities:

  1. Secure backups of website and database
  2. Security scans and monitoring
  3. Software updates and patches for WordPress core
  4. Software updates and patches for WordPress plugins
  5. Software updates and patches for WordPress themes
  6. Remote surveillance and up-time monitoring
  7. Performance monitoring
  8. Website Reputation and monitoring 

The Basic plan is a maintenance only service and does not include any support as part of the plan. Support may be requested and is billed at $99/hour. 

6.1.2 WordPress Support

Unlike WordPress Maintenance, which is planned & scheduled, WordPress Support is an on-demand service. Support requests are limited to the WordPress site according to your plan. Requests for support can be raised via our Client Area or via email and includes:

  • fixing broken functions & features
  • operations and administration support
  • content creation and editing
  • website changes
  • plugin and theme configuration

Net Solutions provides bundled WordPress Maintenance and Support on most plans:

  • The Basic plan includes no support per month
  • The Standard plan includes 30min of support per month
  • The Premium plan includes 1hour of support per month
  • The Enterprise plan includes 2hours of support per month 

Support for the Basic plan, or any additional time beyond the included time for all other packages is billed at $99/hour during Business Hours. 

Important Notes

  • All rates specified exclude GST
  • All rates are for work performed during Business Hours 
  • Any requests that fall outside Business Hours and are performed during Extended Hours will be billed at 150% of the applicable rate.
  • Any requests that fall outside Business Hours and are performed during After Hours will be billed at 200% of the applicable rate.
  • All time is billed in 30min increments.

Priority

Any requests that are requested or implied as HIGH or URGENT will prioritised in our support queue. Once prioritised your account will attract a priority bump fee of half (50%) of the hourly rate for the given department.

Where Priority support falls outside Business Hours the applicable priority bump fee of half (50%) of the Extended Hours and or After Hours rate will apply for the given department..

Any unused time for a given month is not carried over to the following month.

6.1.3 Service Restrictions

The WordPress Maintenance service is for single sites only, with the following conditions:

  1. Service is only available on the Net Solutions hosting platform.
    1. In some cases the service may be available on other provider's hosting platforms subject to Net Solutions approval. In such a case the Client is responsible for server management & maintenance that the site is hosted on. Client also acknowledges that some components of service may not be available due to limitations.
  2. You can only sign up for a single installation of WordPress or one website inside a WordPress multi-site installation (per service)
  3. You cannot change your website name once you have signed up for WordPress Maintenance. You may however cancel your service subscription anytime and re-join with a new website
  4. You may not re-sell or re-brand our services as your own
  5. Service may be suspended if it is moved to another provider's network without our approval

6.1.4 Software Updates

We follow best practices when updating WordPress, Plugins & Themes and always make a backup. However, as we are not the authors of the plugins and themes you may have installed, we cannot guarantee or warrant that they will be error-free, bug-free or function as described by the author. If issues do arise due to a plugin or theme update, we can roll back the update or contact the author or your web developer.

6.1.5 Free plugins and themes

Free WordPress themes and plugins usually offer updates and support through the WordPress repository. The developers of these themes and plugins provide them for free. They are also distributed with no warranties, so if something goes wrong, you will have to bear the risk and cost.

We will use our best efforts to update free WordPress themes and plugins and will update them as they become available via the official WordPress.org repository periodically according to your plan.

6.1.6 Premium plugins and themes

Premium WordPress themes and plugins are commercial products and usually require an active license to receive support and software updates. Licenses are usually purchased for an agreed annual recurring fee. If your site has premium WordPress themes or plugins installed without an active license, then we cannot perform updates to those plugins and themes. If you don't update all your plugins and themes, you are putting your site at risk from bugs, defects and hackers.

If your site has premium plugins and themes that are not managed by Net Solutions, support for those plugins or themes will need to be managed by the client. In such a case Net Solutions is unable to use the clients license, login details or credentials to request support. 

6.1.6.1 Client managed premium plugins and themes

If your site has premium plugins and themes and they have an active license then Net Solutions will update these plugins and themes as part of the WordPress Maintenance as long as the license is valid and they support automatic updates.

If they don't support automatic updates then you will need to update these plugins and themes yourself manually. In such as case we are unable to use clients login details, or have the client forward, license keys, or updated plugins to Net Solutions. In such a case, these premium plugins and themes will be disavowed or excluded from our WordPress Maintenance service.

6.1.6.2 Net Solutions managed premium plugins and themes

If your site has premium plugins and themes and they don't have an active license, Net Solutions are able to purchase non-transferable licenses to be used on your site. This way we can update premium plugins and themes as part of WordPress Maintenance. This add-on service will make sure your premium plugins and themes are updated.

Our fees for WordPress Premium Plugin or Theme License and Support are billed separately and all costs are passed on from the plugin or theme vendor. We also need to add currency conversion (if applicable) plus GST (if applicable) and a 20% processing & handling fee.

When Net Solutions purchases licenses for premium plugins and themes, the licenses are non-transferable. The license remains the property of Net Solutions and you won't be able to use this license for your own use. If we determine that our license keys have been misused or stolen this will be deemed as theft.

6.1.7 Child Themes

A child theme in WordPress is a sub theme that inherits all the functionality, features, and style of its parent theme. Child themes are a safe way to modify a WordPress theme without making any changes to the parent theme’s files. When the parent theme gets updated, changes made in the child theme are preserved and applied on the updated version as well. It is highly recommended that your site use child themes otherwise any updates performed on the parent theme may break your customisations.

6.1.8 WordPress, Plugin or Theme Defects

The WordPress maintenance service will help mitigate any potential issues with software defects. Net Solutions cannot warrant that your site is operating 100% error free or contains no defects or bugs. If your site is not working 100% correctly some of common root cause issues include:

  1. WordPress, Plugin or Theme contains a defect. All software can never be warranted to be 100% safe from defects or bugs. 
  2. Plugin clashes. Not all plugins work well with each other, some plugins are known to cause issues with other plugins. 
  3. Site has had a configuration change. If you have multiple administrators, an administrator may have changed plugins or configuration
  4. Theme or Plugin is no longer supported by the developers or has reached reached end-of-life
  5. Poor quality site. Some sites are built poorly or contains software and development code that is not of the minimum required quality level.

Plugin or Theme defects are handled outside WordPress Maintenance and are considered to be a WordPress Support case. Support may be billable, according to your Plan. We will try to resolve the issue but we cannot warrant any theme, plugin, or WordPress or be held responsible for any cause and effect or data or revenue loss that may occur as a result of the use of WordPress or any plugins or theme.

In some cases we will need to take your site down to protect the hosting server from misuse. In such cases Net Solutions will usually provide advice on the best solution going forward.

6.1.9 Secure Access

Net Solutions will require administrator access to your WordPress site to fulfil the service. The client will either supply a Net Solutions Administrator account or Net Solutions will create one. If you or another authorised third party or administrator removes access or degrades this account, the service will be 'Suspended'.

In addition to the administrator account, Net Solutions may require additional management plugins. These additional plugins are required to fulfil the service. If any of these plugins are de-activated or removed by the client or a third party the service will be 'Suspended'.

6.1.10 Service Suspension

If your site has been moved to a provider other than Net Solutions, the service will be placed in 'Suspended' status.

If any of the Management plugins have been de-activated or removed from your site, the service will be placed in 'Suspended' status.

If the service status is set to 'Suspended', Net Solutions will notify the client that the service has been suspended via the client portal, billing contact or phone call.

While the service is 'Suspended', the client acknowledges that the WordPress Maintenance & Support service will not be performed. The service will remain 'Suspended' until the client advises Net Solutions to re-activate the service and agrees to pay a $44 service re-activation fee. Should the site be compromised or hacked while in 'Suspended' status all additional activities required to repair or remedy the site are billable at $99/hour.

If your site has Administrators other than Net Solutions whose activities cause operational issues with your site, any remedial actions required by Net Solutions to restore your site will be billable at $99/hour.

6.1.11 Secure backups and Restore

Backups are performed once per day via our WordPress Maintenance plugin and are retained for a fixed number of days according to your WordPress Maintenance plan. There are also limits on the maximum size of your data. It is your responsibility to make sure the size of your data does not exceed maximum backup size according to your plan. If the size of your data exceeds the maximum backup size the daily backup process will fail until the data is below the maximum backup size

We will use the daily backups to restore your site should our update fail or produce an error.

Should you require a restoration from a backup for your own purposes, manual restorations may be requested by raising a service request. We allow for one (1) restoration per month without fee. Additional restorations in any given month are billed at $44 per request.

If you have exceeded your backup data allowance a restore may not be possible. In this case you can request a full account restore from our internal server backups. Due to its complexity this request is subject to $132 per 10GB storage or there part of. This request may take 48 hours to process.

6.1.12 Security scans and monitoring

Security scans are performed on a daily basis. If there are any vulnerabilities this will be flagged and checked by by our engineeres. If the vulnerability cannot be resolved, Net Solutions will raise the issue with client for a resolution. As per of the security scans Net Solutions will also perform daily Web Trust scans using the following Website Reputation service providers.

  1. Google Safe Browsing
  2. Sucuri Malware Labs
  3. Norton Safe Web
  4. Mcafee SiteAdvisor
  5. Bitdefender

Should your site be flagged with one of the Web Trust providers above, Net Solutions will raise the issue with client for a resolution.

Uptime monitoring is performed on your website every minute from multiple locations around the world. 

 


By using the Services, you also agree to our master Terms of Service which become part of your agreement with us (collectively, the “Terms”). 

 


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