General Maintenance Questions
The following questions cover fundamental aspects of shop maintenance: What is actually included in a maintenance contract? Who benefits from a managed service? And how does professional maintenance differ from managing updates yourself? These questions help you understand the scope of our services.
- What exactly is included in a maintenance contract? A maintenance contract bundles everything a shop needs on an ongoing basis for stable, secure operation. This includes regular security updates for core, plugins and server software with an upstream staging test, 24/7 uptime monitoring with active alerting, daily automatic backups with tested recovery, SSL certificate management and monthly or quarterly status reports. On top of that come binding response times per SLA and a dedicated contact person who knows your system. The specific scope is always tailored individually to your project: a high-revenue shop with payment integrations and seasonal load peaks needs a different setup than a content website. Across over 50 managed projects (own project experience), the combination of proactive updates, monitoring and tested backups has shown that most emergencies never arise in the first place. Which building blocks make sense for you is something we clarify in the initial consultation.
- Who benefits from a managed service contract? A maintenance contract is worthwhile for any company that treats its online shop or website as business-critical infrastructure. When downtime directly costs revenue, or an unnoticed security gap puts your customers' trust at risk, ongoing support is not optional but a basic requirement. Typical profiles are shop operators with meaningful online revenue, companies without their own IT department, and agencies wanting to reliably outsource the technical operation of their client projects. A managed service is especially valuable after a security incident or for an aging shop that ran without updates for a long time. Here the benefit shifts from pure reaction toward genuine prevention. Whether the effort pays off for your specific setup is something we assess honestly in the initial consultation or based on our services overview.
- Why should I not handle maintenance myself? Self-managed maintenance is fundamentally possible but requires continuous expertise in platform updates, newly disclosed vulnerabilities, plugin compatibility and server configuration. It also requires the necessary infrastructure: a real staging environment for testing, a monitoring system with alerting, and proven backup and recovery procedures. The real pitfall is rarely a single update but the chain of time pressure, a missing test and a plugin that breaks after the update. In practice, many shop operators underestimate exactly this ongoing effort and the short half-life of the knowledge involved. Professional maintenance shifts the risk to someone who runs these processes daily and frees up your internal resources for the core business. Which tasks you keep and which we take over can be divided flexibly, for instance through training for your team.
- Which systems do you support? Our core focus is on Shopware Community Edition and WordPress including common shop plugins. With Shopware, we deliberately work within the open-source CE, so you are not pushed into proprietary licensing models. With WordPress, we support both classic content websites and shop setups with the widely used extensions. Beyond that, we maintain the underlying server infrastructure: Linux systems, web servers, database servers and caching components. It is precisely this end-to-end view from the application down to the operating system that distinguishes real operational responsibility from simply clicking plugin updates. Which building blocks are relevant for your platform is visible in our services overview.
- Do you also offer maintenance for other shop systems? Our focus is clearly on Shopware CE and WordPress with shop plugins, because here we have the deepest operational experience and know update paths, typical failure patterns and plugin behavior in detail. For other platforms such as TYPO3 or further content management systems, we evaluate on a case-by-case basis whether meaningful support at the usual quality is possible. The deciding factor is less the name of the system than whether we can reliably map the update and security processes. Rather than making a promise we cannot keep, we look at your specific environment. Raise this during the initial consultation, and we will give you an honest assessment of feasibility.
- Can I book individual services without a contract? Yes, we offer many services as one-time projects without committing you to an ongoing contract. These include security audits, performance analyses, cleanup after a hack via our emergency support and server migrations. This is a good way to obtain a first objective condition report on your shop. For continuous operation, however, we recommend a maintenance contract, because many of the most valuable measures only work proactively: monitoring alerts before an outage, an update closes a gap before it is exploited. One-time services repair; a maintenance contract prevents. Which variant fits your situation is something we are happy to clarify in a non-binding conversation.