Low tide at Te Henga, Bethells Beach. Tidal channels cut through black sand below a dune face, with the headland in silhouette at dusk.

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

Surf running up a black sand beach over a line of footprints, with a bush-covered headland under grey cloud.

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.

A grass-topped sand bank with dark and pale layers, above a black sand beach with surf and a bush-covered headland beyond.

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.

A rusted bolt set into a weathered timber post, with grey surf and a black sand beach out of focus behind.

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

About you

Thanks, that has arrived. You will get a reply from me, not an autoresponder.