[bigiain]

If you haven't discussed it up front with them, you're going to have to tread carefully.

We offer, as part of the handover when we deliver a site, a "support contract" which includes a few hours of phone support per month as well as software security updates. It's made clear in this offer that if your not on our support contract, any time doing that is chargeable at our regular rates.

What you need to do is make sure you and your clients are both aware of all the different responsibilities in keeping a website up (from the network connectivity and hosting hardware, through the OS, OS applications, web app dependancies to the web application software), in many cases the "web developer" has no control over some of those responsibilities (particularly if the customer is organizing the web hosting), and everybody needs to be aware of who to call, and who's responsible for fixing problems at each layer, and how the cost of that responsibility is going to be borne. In my experience, everything between the OS install and the web app software (Wordpress/Drupal/custom written app) is often overlooked - who's responsible for keeping apache/MySQL/nginx/memcached/sendmail/named up to date? Customers in general don't even know they're using those things. Race-to-the-bottom-price hosting companies aren't going to be proactive about protecting your $4.95/month hosting account. Unless you've raised these issues with your clients beforehand, your relying purely on their goodwill towards you to get paid for any time you spend fixing problems you never knew you signed up to accept responsibility for…

[joubee]

Yes I should have included what happens when a site is compromised in the terms. As the developer, not host this just didn't occur to me. I provide a 90 warranty but generally this only requires a small amount of hours as major problems are usually picked up in testing.

tyvm - great comments