
Web development, West Auckland
Your website, kept running, changes handled.
Most small businesses don't want a website project. They want a website that works, stays up, stays current, and does not become somebody's second job. That is the whole offer.
About
One person, one relationship
Ironsand Systems is a solo practice. Every conversation, proposal, build and monthly check-in comes from the same person, so nobody hands you on and you never have to wonder who actually knows your site.
The trade-off is capacity. I take on a small number of clients and look after them properly, which means a request reaches the person who built the site rather than a queue.
The monthly service
What the fee covers
Hosting and certificates
The site is served from an edge network rather than a single server, so there is no box to fall over. Certificates renew automatically and nobody has to remember them.
Daily backups
Taken every day and held for the retention period written into your agreement. Many New Zealand providers don't publish a retention period at all, which is worth asking any of them about.
Uptime monitoring
Run from somewhere other than the site itself, so an outage is something we notice and tell you about rather than something you report to us.
Security and dependency updates
Applied and tested before they reach your site. This is the part that quietly stops being done when a site is handed to whoever has time.
Your content changes
Send them through and we make them. The allowance is written into your agreement, judged over a quarter rather than metered by the month. If you want the ability to make changes yourself, we can set that up too.
Working together
How an engagement runs
01
A conversation
What the organisation does, who the site is for, and what it actually has to achieve. Usually no more than an hour, and it is free.
02
A written proposal
Scope, a fixed implementation price, and the monthly service fee, in writing before anything is built. No hourly estimates that drift.
03
The build
Built, reviewed with you as it goes, and tested. You see the real site rather than a slide of one.
04
Then it runs
Live, monitored, backed up and maintained from the day it launches. The monthly service starts here and the relationship is meant to be a long one.
Recent work
Built and running now
Westgate Baptist Church
A West Auckland church site with a sermon archive that updates itself after each service. Built, hosted and kept current by us, including automation of weekly content changes the staff would otherwise be doing themselves.
Writing
Thinking out loud

Search · 13 September 2026
AI search is sending fewer people to your website
When Google answers a question itself, fewer people click through to a website. What the research shows, what Google says you need to do, and where your effort is better spent.

Hosting · 13 September 2026
Why your website needs a retention policy
Most providers will tell you they take backups. Far fewer will tell you how long they keep them, or whether they have ever restored one. What to ask, and what a good answer sounds like.

Security · 13 September 2026
The real cost of not updating
Most website break-ins do not need a clever attacker. They need a plugin nobody updated. What the 2025 vulnerability figures say about how quickly that window closes.
Leaving
If it ends, you keep everything
Your domain is registered in your name, not ours. That single decision removes the most common reason these separations turn ugly, and it costs nothing to make at the start.
On termination, with your account settled, you get your site code, content, database and media within twenty working days in a standard portable format.
Start a conversation
Tell me what the site has to do
Describe the organisation and what the site needs to do, and you will get a straight answer about whether this is a good fit. No discovery call sequence, no endless proposal deck.
Rather use your own mail client? Write to the address above and you will get the same answer.
Send a message
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