The work started as an emergency. Both sites had been compromised on shared hosting, and the immediate job was to find what was there, remove it, close the way in, and confirm the result rather than assume it.
That part is finished. Both sites have been verified clean and have stayed clean.
Then it became maintenance
After a cleanup, the interesting question is what happens over the next year. Sites get compromised again when nobody is watching updates, backups, and access. So the relationship became an ongoing maintenance retainer: updates applied and checked, backups captured and stored off the host, and a written log of what was done and when.
Keeping the log matters more than it sounds. When something goes wrong eighteen months later, the difference between an hour of work and a week of work is whether anyone wrote down what changed.
Then an audit changed the scope
Preparing to move hosts, an audit of the store and the mailboxes found problems that had nothing to do with the original compromise. Outbound mail was broken on both sites, which meant order confirmations were not reaching customers and some orders had never been fulfilled. Mailboxes were spread across three separate email products on three separate contracts, at a cost nobody had added up.
That changed the job. Moving the setup as it stood would have carried every fault across to the new host and hidden them under a fresh invoice. So the plan became a rebuild on clean foundations instead of a copy.
The hosting decision
Eight providers were compared on real numbers rather than marketing pages: current measured cost, what the sites actually use, what email would cost separately, and what happens at renewal. The result cut the monthly hosting bill to roughly forty percent of what was being paid, with mail moved to free forwarding into a normal inbox plus a dedicated sending relay.
The account is created in the client’s own legal name and business details, with her own payment method, so ownership is never ambiguous. At go live she receives a handover pack with everything she needs if she ever wants to work with somebody else.