Website care plans are an essential part of the ongoing maintenance of your site. Without you’re asking for problems.
This is the sort of thing I hear fairly often, and people are not entirely wrong.
Hosting companies do offer automated backups and updates, that part is true. What they do not do is test those backups to confirm they actually restore cleanly, or test updates to confirm nothing has broken after they run. There is no warranty, no one checking the outcome, and no one to call when something goes wrong. My care plans include hosting precisely because I want the comparison to be fair — it is not an add-on, it is already in there. What you are paying for above that is the layer of human oversight that hosting companies will never provide.
I’ve identified the changes side of a care plan correctly as something hosting companies will not touch but then moved past it quickly. That is actually a significant part of the picture. A care plan is not just backups and updates — it is ongoing content changes, security monitoring, performance checks, priority support, and critically, someone accountable when something goes wrong. When a site goes down during a key trading period or a business gets a call about a data breach, who do they contact? A hosting company’s support queue, or someone who knows their business, has eyes on it regularly, and has skin in the game? That accountability is what a care plan actually is, and it is something no hosting platform will ever offer.
The bigger point though is that a care plan is fundamentally a cybersecurity measure. The fact that his reaction was “hosting does that for free” is actually the clearest illustration of the problem we face in the US market — businesses are not taking cyber security seriously enough. Automated updates with no testing, no monitoring, no accountability — that is not a security posture, that is just hoping for the best.
Regarding AI — it is transformative, and I say that as someone who pays for access to the leading AI tools from Anthropic, Google and Microsoft. I use them every day. They have made me significantly faster and the quality of what I can produce has genuinely improved. But here is what AI cannot do yet: allow someone without experience to build a website that actually delivers results. Anyone has been able to build a website that looks good for well over a decade — that is what platforms and software solved in 2010. Looking good has never been the hard part. Ranking, converting, performing under load, integrating correctly — that still requires someone who knows what they are doing.
Give an experienced developer an AI tool and they build faster and better than ever. Give an inexperienced person the same tool and they get a nice-looking site that does not perform. The tool does not close that gap.
And that gap becomes a liability when you factor in security. The volume of security vulnerabilities I am seeing in AI-generated code is not improving. If you do not know how to audit what the AI is producing, you are leaving your business and your customers exposed to a data breach waiting to happen. That is not hypothetical, it is already happening. And when it does happen, someone has to be accountable. A hosting company is not going to step up. Our care plan means there is someone in their corner who will.
The web development market is absolutely changing. The people who will struggle are those who only know how to build websites. The ones who will do well are those who understand how to use AI as a tool, know how to deliver results, and can speak credibly to security. That is exactly where I am positioning.
Cybersecurity is often the first thing a client asks about when scoping a project — it is treated as a requirement, not an optional extra. Here in the US, particularly at the small business level, it tends to be viewed as an unnecessary expense right up until something goes wrong. That is a tough culture to sell into, but it is also an opportunity. The businesses that do understand it are exactly the clients worth having, and being the person who can articulate why it matters puts you ahead of every web developer who is just talking about design and price.
