The website maintenance book that tells you what to refuse

Most guides to recurring website work are about selling plans. This one is about being able to keep them.

It opens with a law firm whose eleven months of backups had never been restored - and which had silently excluded the uploads directory since month three, after a plugin update changed a configuration default. A backup you have never restored is not a backup. It is a file, and a feeling.

Everything here is built on four rules: you have restored a backup before you promise one; every credential is theirs, held the way they can revoke it; nothing goes live that has not been through staging; and the plan says exactly what is included, what is not, and what happens at two in the morning - in writing, before the first payment.

Around those rules sit 37 chapters covering what clients actually buy, how to qualify and audit a site, taking over access without breaking something at three in the morning, backups that survive a real restore, updates and third-party risk, security response and its honest limits, uptime and what you can never promise, change requests and where every plan leaks money, reporting a client can understand, service tiers, pricing from a true-cost floor, agreements, difficult conversations, incidents, retention, bookkeeping, and a realistic first year.

And 68 printable resources: the professional questions record, the claims audit, the signed refusal statement, the access register, the onboarding audit and baseline record, the backup register and restore drill log, the incident runbook, the monthly checklist that records values rather than ticks, the quality gate, the report template, the true-cost floor calculator, the agreement outline, the client message library, the dispute procedure, the KPI scorecard, and 100 copy-and-paste AI prompts.

It states no law, no price, no market rate, and no platform rule. It names no tool and recommends none. It promises no clients and no income - the commonest twelve-month outcome it describes is two clients and about six dollars an hour, and it says so plainly.

What it offers instead is a defensible way of working, and the one thing nobody else in this trade will tell you: how to know when a client should stop paying you.