Hello!

Please find below a straightforward, easy to understand summary of what our responsibilities are to you as a client. Throughout, “Loud Cow” refers to the owner, contracted IT support personnel and all international freelancers that work tirelessly together to get your website online.

What Loud Cow does – Our responsibility to you

Loud Cow’s service includes building WordPress websites using the latest versions of WordPress open source software, 3rd party Premium Theme developers and plugins.

Organising hosting, running software updates and taking payments for same is a value added complimentary service offered to clients to help them get online a.s.a.p without having the headache of dealing with hosts directly, organising domain registration, changing DNS settings and all other technical requirements required to have your new site appearing on your domain name address.

If you’ve ever attempted this on your own you will appreciate and understand the worth and value of this service. Consider us the ‘unpaid middle man’. Putting the pieces of the ‘hosting puzzle’ together can be confusing. We’re here to help you through this.

Although ALL care is taken at every point in development and maintenance of your website, we are not the hosts and do not maintain or own the servers your site is hosted on. Hence, we cannot take responsibility for site downtime, mail issues or data loss should the hosting environment be affected by hacking, corrupt files, malware or any other technical issue.  Rest assured, full daily backups are taken of your site files and can usually be restored. However, in some rare circumstances, backup files can also be corrupted. For e-commerce sites, we again use plugins and 3rd party connectors to payment gateways (PayPal, EWay etc) and cannot be held responsible for technical or security issues or failings that may occur.

We suggest that clients take control of their own backups ensuring no loss of data.

Web Hosts we use

Hosting is currently sourced through Sydney-based servers through vultr.com . We also use and highly recommend wpengine.com and getflywheel.com based in the US – BUT the servers are here in Sydney. Load times are not affected. Reason not an Australian based managed option? If I could find one comparable I would definitely use them. Nothing on the market presently.

Please refer to 3rd party websites for uptime and data backup guarantees.

Note we are more than happy to use other reputable WordPress hosts you feel more comfortable with.

If you would like to migrate your site to other hosting you are most welcome. We can provide alternative recommendations.

Email Hosts

We recommend first up Google Apps for Business – we offer as part of our web development service a FREE Google Apps setup. Once the setup is complete clients are then responsible for administering and paying their Google Account direct with Google OR we can set up reimbursement emails. We’re here to help with troubleshooting but that’s it:)

Third Party Plugins and Theme Developers

To ensure no long term headaches we use only premium WordPress themes that are paid for – not free – from reputable developers. To add extra functionality to your site e..g contact form, social media plugin – only reputable, respected plugins are used from the WordPress.org site – some are paid and some are free.

Please note that should a plugin or theme developer not continue theme/plugin development for any reason, and the theme or plugin presently installed on your site becomes incompatible with later released versions of WordPress software we will do all possible to ensure an alternative is sourced. This will be at a cost to the client.

Note this situation has never presented itself. However, should it occur, Loud Cow cannot be deemed responsible.

Keeping WordPress, Themes and Plugins up to date

Ongoing, if you are using hosting sourced through us, Loud Cow will help you with updates to themes, WordPress core and plugins when new releases are available. Like your own home or office computer, keeping your software up to date is important and necessary – particularly for security. If you are presently using our services now you may not even realise the mammoth amount of work and time involved in the constant updating of all client sites.

Generally, thanks to awesome WordPress usability, updates are simply a “click of a button”. However, if issues of compatibility occur we cannot accept responsibility for same. Generally a work around can be fixed easily either by deleting the plugin and finding an alternative or by addressing Theme/Plugin developer forums and requesting assistance. We are happy to do this on your behalf and do everything possible to ensure all things return to normal. However, should the fix be something that requires more than 30 minutes work this will be at the expense of the client.

Note updates occur on a needs basis. If you see a plugin update required this will occur in the next round of updates unless the plugin/theme or WP core update is required for patching a security issue. We have alerts set in place that tell us when there’s a security issue. As soon as received we jump in and sort the update ASAP.

Summary

We truly love to help you where we can and we do everything possible to ensure no headaches when it comes to web hosting, email services and site maintenance.

We also work towards ensuring your site is less susceptible to compromises. When it comes to site security, regardless of where you host your site, the threats are ever present. No host can guarantee your site will not be compromised.

Software updates and compatibility issues that may arise are an ongoing, online reality. If you’re in business online it’s a business in itself to keep up to date. We help tirelessly with this and ensure compatibility and seamless integration but cannot be responsible if suddenly an update causes an error on your site. Rest assured we’ll do everything we can to ensure any issues are fixed asap.