Technical Website Support After Launch
First 3 months after launch — most vulnerable: issues emerge that testing missed. After this period, support nature changes: fewer urgent fixes, more planned improvements.
What technical support includes
Reactive support:
- Bug fixes — form won't submit, page throws 500
- Recovery from failures — server down, disk full
- Breach cleanup aftermath
Proactive support:
- Uptime and alerting monitoring
- Dependency updates (CMS, plugins, npm packages)
- Backup and restore verification
- SSL certificate checks
- Performance monitoring
Planned work:
- Content updates on request
- Improvements and minor enhancements
- Analytics and reports
SLA: typical service levels
| Incident type | Response | Resolution |
|---|---|---|
| Site unavailable (P1) | 30 min | 2–4 hours |
| Critical function broken (P2) | 2 hours | 8 hours |
| Important bug (P3) | 8 hours | 2 business days |
| Minor improvement (P4) | 1 business day | By agreement |
Support tools
Monitoring: UptimeRobot, Better Uptime, Grafana + Prometheus
Alerting: PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Telegram bot
Logging: Sentry (frontend/backend errors), Logtail, Papertrail
Backups: S3-compatible storage, auto daily backups
Monitoring key metrics
# prometheus/alerts.yaml
groups:
- name: website
rules:
- alert: SiteDown
expr: probe_success{job="blackbox"} == 0
for: 2m
annotations:
summary: "Site {{ $labels.instance }} is down"
- alert: SlowResponse
expr: probe_duration_seconds{job="blackbox"} > 5
for: 5m
annotations:
summary: "Slow response: {{ $value }}s"
- alert: HighErrorRate
expr: rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m]) > 0.05
annotations:
summary: "Error rate {{ $value | humanizePercentage }}"
Change log
Record every change:
2024-03-15 — Updated WordPress to 6.5.2 (security)
2024-03-14 — Fixed feedback form (bug #142)
2024-03-12 — Updated SSL certificate
2024-03-10 — Added new service page /ai-consulting
Support contract formats
Hourly package — X hours per month, balance not carried over. Good for small sites with irregular tasks.
Retainer — fixed monthly fee for defined work volume and SLA. More stable for both sides.
Time & Materials — pay for actual hours spent. Transparent but harder to budget.