I didn’t have a contract. I was doing it myself, and sometimes I’d reach out to Audrey for advice.

My only hesitation was the price.

I was looking at this as the monthly updates, which take about a minute when everything goes smoothly. But everything doesn’t always go smoothly, and when there was an issue earlier in the year I spent about a week trouble-shooting it.

My hesitation was, I figured that the same issue would have been resolved in short order with someone like Audrey doing the updates so I was still thinking that it seemed like a lot to pay for what would probably be just a few minutes’ work most months.

Finally I told myself that I was paying to save myself the week’s struggle if/when something came up. That the annual fee is what I’d pay not to have to go through another week like that.

(Not to mention, once I had experienced that week, I became extremely reluctant to do my updates for fear that I’d get bogged down in another week of troubleshooting.)

After I hired StressLessWeb to do maintenance and support, I was impressed at how careful and thorough they were with the updates.

First the sandbox was updated before updating my site.

That’s when I realized that, the way StressLessWeb was doing the updates, (1) takes more than a couple of minutes, and (2) meant that I would never experience my site being out of commission for a week (because they were being so careful to do updates in the sandbox first). So I felt very reassured about my business never being at risk of being impacted by updates.

Because the updates are done in the sandbox first, I would never have my business frozen by a broken forum because of an update issue.

So now:
1) I’ll never have my time held hostage because of trying to resolve an update issue myself.

2) When non-update issues arise, Audrey is helpful even though it’s outside the scope of our contract. That was true before (because she built my site) but I’m more comfortable reaching out to her now that (1) I’m paying for support, even if it’s different support than what I’m asking for help with, and (2) we’re in touch on more a regular basis because of the updates.

Would I recommend StressLessWeb?
Absolutely. You’re thorough, accessible, available, friendly and reassuring.

I’d also like to add
This is for web design, not maintenance. A huge benefit when you were building my site was the fact that you understand the BrainAudit. When I was writing the copy for my home page, you sent it back to me and said it didn’t have a Problem-Solution. You made me apply Sean’s material to what I was doing. That’s huge. I don’t think 5000bc members(cavers) realize how big that is.