Webarchitects Co-operative will charge £90 per hour for general technical support work and £120 per hour for development work from 1st December 2018.
The management committee voted to make these changes on 15th November for the key reason that we need to increase income to afford better wages. We currently pay ourselves £10 an hour (before tax and other deductions) and we consider this to be too low (it is however above the current Living Wage for outside London, £9 an hour, but it is below the London rate, £10.55 an hour and it is in line with the TUC policy of £10 an hour minimum wage). We would like the rate to be £15 an hour, but this is not currently affordable.
Examples of technical support (£90/hour) work include:
- Sysadmin, general GNU/Linux systems administration tasks
- Installing Free / libre open source content management systems such as WordPress, Drupal etc.
- Editing HTML / CSS content
- Manipulating web images, resizing, changing colours, adding transparency
- Migrating a WordPress site from another hosting service to a hosting account on our servers
- Configuring our DNS servers to host client domains
- Applying security updates to servers
- Checking server logs for application errors
- Archiving dynamic website as static HTML
- Helping clients to configure their email clients
Examples of development work (£120/hour) include:
- Devops, developing, writing and committing code to git repositories for server configuration
- Writing Ansible roles and playbooks to configure, maintain and update servers
- Configuring GitLab CI for testing and deployment of code
- Writing Bash scripts to automate tasks on servers
We generally host our code on git.coop, which is our members GitLab server. Examples hosted there of development for clients include work for Co-operative Press Ltd and CRIN. We try to make as much of our Ansible code open and available to be shared as possible, you can find many Ansible roles on git.coop.
Users with shared hosting and managed virtual servers are not likely to notice this change (for example, WordPress hosting packages and Nextcloud servers). Essential security updates will still be applied as part of these packages. We are increasingly automating the work we do through the use of Ansible, a tool for scripting the provisioning and maintenance of servers, enabling us to to be more efficient — we are able to do more work in less time.
From 1st December 2018 we will be no longer offering fixed reduced rates for support contracts, we are however willing to negotiate reduced, fixed rates for members on a case-by-case basis.