Your website goes down. You message your hosting provider, who says the server is fine and it is a problem with your site. You message whoever built the site, who says it is a hosting problem. Both are being honest, and you are the one still down.
This happens because hosting and maintenance are genuinely different jobs with a boundary in the middle that nobody draws for you. Here is where the line actually sits.
What hosting is responsible for
- The server being switched on and reachable
- PHP, the database software and the server stack
- Their own network, their own backups of their own infrastructure
- SSL, if it is included in your plan
Notice what is not there: anything inside your website. A host will not update your plugins, will not notice that your contact form stopped sending, and will not restore yesterday’s version of your homepage because their backups exist to rebuild their server, not to undo your mistake.
What maintenance is responsible for
- WordPress core, plugin and theme updates, with a backup taken before each
- Backups of your site, stored somewhere other than that server
- Security scanning, hardening and cleanup
- Uptime monitoring, so somebody knows before your customers do
- The small things that break after an update
That is the work in a website maintenance plan, and no hosting package includes it, whatever the marketing page implies.
The overlaps that cause the argument
Backups. Both parties say they have them. The host’s backup restores the server to an earlier state and often only covers the last few days. The maintenance backup restores your site specifically, is dated, and lives elsewhere. If you only have the first kind, you are one bad update away from finding out the difference.
Speed. A slow site can be a slow server or a heavy site, and each side reasonably suspects the other. It is diagnosable in an afternoon, but only by somebody willing to look at both.
SSL. Usually issued by the host, usually renewed automatically, and silently broken often enough that somebody should be checking. Nobody is, unless it is written down.
Downtime. The host guarantees the server. Nothing in that guarantee promises your site works.
How to tell which side a problem is on, before you call anyone
Two checks settle most of these arguments in about five minutes.
Is anything else on that server up? If your host runs other sites you can reach, or their status page says everything is normal, the server is probably fine and the problem is inside your site. If the whole account is unreachable, it is not your plugins.
What changed most recently? Sites rarely break spontaneously. If something was updated, installed or edited in the last day or two, that is the first suspect regardless of which side you thought it was on. If genuinely nothing changed on your side, a host-side change becomes much more likely — PHP versions, in particular, get raised without much warning and quietly break older plugins.
Neither check needs technical skill, and both save the round of messages where each side points at the other.
The four things to have in writing
- Who owns the hosting account. It should be you, registered in your name and your email, whoever administers it day to day.
- Where the backups are and who tests them. Host backups and maintenance backups are different; assume neither exists until somebody has actually restored one.
- Who renews the SSL and the domain, and what happens if that person is unavailable in the week it expires.
- Who is called first when the site is down, and what they are expected to do before escalating to the other party.
None of this costs anything to agree in advance. All of it is expensive to work out during an outage.
Should you buy them together?
Bundling is convenient and has one genuine benefit: one number to call, and no argument about whose fault it is. The cost is that leaving becomes harder, because your hosting, your site and your backups all sit with the same provider.
Our honest preference is to keep them separate and make sure the boundary is written down instead. You should own the hosting account in your own name, whoever manages it — that single decision is what keeps a bad relationship from becoming an expensive one. Our hosting and domain support covers the server side, maintenance covers the site side, and either can be bought without the other.
If you are still choosing a host, our guide to website hosting charges in India sets out the real monthly numbers and the renewal trap that catches people in year two.