Keeping a small site alive

Sites rarely die all at once. They drift, then break quietly, and the owner finds out when a customer mentions that the form never replied.

The three ways it fails

The domain expires. Someone changes bank details, the card fails, the reminder goes to an old address, and the site is gone. This one is purely organisational and it is the most common. Put the renewal date in two calendars and set the registrar contact to an address that will still exist in five years.

Something in the stack stops updating. Only applies to the dynamic part. A server application needs security updates, and old PHP versions on shared hosting get switched off eventually. A static page has no stack, which is the main argument for keeping the public pages as files.

Nobody notices a broken form. A contact form that fails silently is worse than no form at all, because you believe you built the pipe. Send a test enquiry every month, from a real phone, and check it arrived.

What a monthly pass is worth

Thirty to sixty minutes a month: try the form, open the page on a phone, check the domain and hosting renewals, confirm the site is in backups, and skim the pages for a price or an opening hour that has changed. That is the whole job on a small site, and it prevents nearly every failure above.

We charge RM30 a month for it, mostly as a reason for both sides to look once a month. If you would rather do it yourself, the checklist above is the entire process.