Website Access & Maintenance Policy

Last updated: 10 April 2025 · Questions: support@neelnetworks.com · Governing law: Mumbai, India

This policy applies to every Neel Networks client and answers one practical question: once a website is live, who is responsible for what?

The short answer is that responsibility follows access. If you request and use administrator or hosting logins, you are responsible for what is done with them. If we are the only party managing access, we look after the technical upkeep within your chosen plan.

The detail below is written in plain language. For the fuller legal position, please see our Credential Handover Disclaimer and Annual Maintenance Plan Terms.

“Access credentials” means any login to the systems your website depends on, including:

• FTP, SFTP or SSH access to the server files
• Hosting control panels such as cPanel or Plesk
• Database administration tools
• Your CMS administrator account, such as WordPress Admin or a Shopify dashboard
• Cloud or server consoles
• Domain registrar, DNS and email administration

• We are always willing to share administrator and hosting logins with you on request. Please change the passwords immediately once you receive them.
• Please do not send us your logins unless you are engaging us for new work such as an update, a fix or a new feature. That work will be scoped and quoted before we begin.
• We would recommend named accounts for each person rather than a shared login, roles limited to what each person actually needs, and two-factor authentication wherever it is offered.

Where you or your team hold the logins, you are responsible for the changes made with them.

• We are not responsible for errors, outages, broken features, slower performance or data loss caused by changes made on your side, or by a third party you have authorised.
• We are not responsible for security incidents such as malware or hacking that follow from exposed credentials, weak passwords, missing updates, unsafe plugins or themes, code edits or server misconfiguration.
• Fixes, investigations and restorations under client-managed access are treated as new, chargeable requests, always quoted before we start.

We say this plainly not to be unhelpful but so that expectations are clear. We will always come to your aid quickly; in these circumstances it is paid work rather than plan cover.

Where we are the only party managing access, technical upkeep forms part of your plan.

• We apply updates on a sensible schedule, such as a monthly patch window, and monitor basic uptime where your plan includes it.
• Anything caused by our own configuration or code is put right within your plan at no additional cost.
• Where a fix requires a paid third-party item — a premium plugin renewal, a licence upgrade, additional infrastructure — we will ask for your approval before any cost is incurred.

• We will tell you when important updates become available, whether to your CMS core, plugins, PHP version, libraries or frameworks.
• Applying them may be chargeable unless your maintenance plan covers it. We will give you an estimate first.
• Major version changes can require extra work, such as replacing a theme or a plugin that is no longer supported. We will quote for that separately.
• Wherever possible, updates are tested on a staging copy before being applied to the live site.

• Where we manage your hosting, we set up scheduled backups in line with the plan we agree with you.
• Where you manage your own hosting, backups are your responsibility unless we have agreed otherwise in writing.
• A restore is included where the problem arose while we were managing access. In any other case, restoring is chargeable.
• Whoever manages the hosting, we would encourage you to keep an independent copy of your files and database somewhere separate.

• We recommend two-factor authentication for all administrators, roles limited to what each person needs, and changing passwords periodically.
• We may suggest security plugins, a firewall or CDN service, malware scanning and server hardening. Any third-party fees for these are payable by you.
• Handling an incident under client-managed access is chargeable. Where we manage access, we deal with anything originating in our own systems or code as part of your plan.

• Your website depends on services run by others — hosting, domains, plugins, themes, APIs and more.
• Renewals for domains, SSL certificates and premium plugins are your responsibility unless your plan expressly includes them.
• Where a supplier makes a breaking change, such as retiring an API, further development may be needed. We will quote for that work before starting it.

• You are responsible for the accuracy and legality of the content and data you provide or publish.
• Anything we share about privacy, cookies or regulation is offered as general guidance. For a binding view on your obligations, please consult your own adviser.

• Standard support hours are 10:00 am to 6:00 pm IST, Monday to Friday. For faster response commitments, please ask us about a maintenance plan.
• Response times vary with your plan and with the complexity of the request.
• New features, redesigns and migrations fall outside routine support and are quoted, or billed hourly, by agreement.

• Work requested while you manage access is chargeable at our standard hourly rate, or against an approved scope.
• Work included in a plan we manage is covered; anything beyond it is quoted first.
• Third-party costs such as licences, premium plugins and infrastructure are payable by you, following your approval.

We do our best to keep every website we build healthy. When you hold the logins, you also hold the risk, and we cannot be responsible for what happens outside our sight. When we manage access, we put right anything arising from our own configuration or code as part of your plan. That is the whole of it.

If anything here is unclear, please write to support@neelnetworks.com. We would far rather answer a question now than resolve a misunderstanding later.