Happy Christmas
As the festive season sparkles around us, all of us at dot create want to extend our warmest wishes to you.
Reflecting on 2024, we are incredibly grateful for your continued support and loyalty. As we step into 2025, we’re excited to continue supporting and growing your websites.
Christmas holiday opening hours
We are closed for the holidays from Monday 23rd December 2024 and our office will reopen from Thursday, 2nd January 2025.
However, as always, we will continue to monitor your websites 24/7 and we will be available for any urgent requests throughout the holiday period.
Also, we’ve made a donation to two charities, including the Railway Children, instead of sending business Christmas cards this time around.
Review of our year
We started the year by moving into our new office in Leigh-on-Sea in February 2024, which has given us room to expand in the future.
In the summer, one of our key highlights of 2024 was attending the WordCamp Europe conference in Turin, Italy, along with 2,500 other members of the WordPress community. It was a great experience to meet new faces, catch-up with familiar faces, listen to interesting talks, and of course enjoy some pizza!
By the end of the year, we’ve installed and checked over 9,000 software updates on our customers’ websites across the past twelve months, which is up almost 20% on the previous year.
We helped several of our long-standing customers refresh their websites, including train operator c2c, which involved revamping their staff intranet site that we first developed in 2012.
And we’ve been delighted to welcome several new customers, who have either moved their existing websites to our care and support, or where we’ve built brand-new websites from scratch. We’ll be sharing some more details of these projects on our new case studies area, which will be coming soon…
In the background, we’ve also built a number of new tools to help us work better and more efficiently, such as new portals for sharing design ideas and concepts, a new online facility for sending project proposals to our customers, a new tool for gathering feedback during projects, a new portal for sharing code between team members, and many more in-house improvements. This will put us on a stronger foundation as we start 2025.
dot create
Over the past year we’ve been introducing our new dot create branding, which we officially launched at Southend-on-Sea City Council’s Business Expo in October.
In the next few weeks we’ll be closing our old website and switching our email addresses to our new brand, but rest assured we’re still the same company and same team here!
Task pricing frozen for 2025
We are freezing our work pricing for 2025 at the same rates we introduced in January 2024, so we’ll be holding these rates for a second year. That means any work tasks carried out on your website will not cost any more this year.
Below-inflation increases for our hosting packages
With our website hosting and maintenance plans, we are having to make some small fee changes to account for our increased data centre and server costs that we’ve been incurring in recent years. We have faced substantial increases to our own costs year after year and have been trying hard not to pass these onto customers for as long as we can.
Our Small Business plan price was last set four years ago, in 2021, despite inflation rising over 25% during those years. We understand that many of our customers are feeling the pressures of cost increases and therefore we have limited the increase we’re passing onto our small business customers to £1 per month, which equates to less than 3%. And this will only apply from the next annual renewal date, which for many customers will be later in 2025.
And for our Business plan, again the prices were last set at the end of 2022, and this year we’re increasing the monthly fee by £3, which equates to just a 5% increase in over two years. This will also only apply from the next renewal date, so customers with a renewal date later in 2025 will continue to benefit from last year’s prices until then.
For any customers on bespoke plans, including our Enterprise plan, we’ll be in touch should any price rises be applicable to your account. Our legacy “Personal website” plan will see no changes.
Over the past year we’ve invested in many improvements, such as increasing the visitor analytics logs for many of our customers, and upgrading the behind-the-scenes technology of our web servers (including moving to new database systems). Our hosting uptime has also excelled this year, with 100% uptime recorded for the past seven consecutive months, which sets a high bar against other web hosts.
Other fees
Our maintenance package, only applicable for customers who host their websites elsewhere, is not seeing any price changes this year.
And our domain name fees, last changed in January 2024, are being held for 2025 too.
No other price changes are planned for 2025.
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year🎄
See you in 2025!