Most of my customers are not familiar with the difference between the concept of maintenance, hosting and change requests. Hosting refers to the storing of the application on a server.

Maintenance refers to the corrective action taken should unexpected events cause the application to fail. It is like insurance in the commercial world. It ensures that some one is there to service your application should it, as the saying goes, kick the bucket.

Change requests on the other hand refers to feature enhancement of the application. In today’s competitive business landscape, it is natural to issue continuous change requests and upgrades to ensure that your web application is effective.

Why do applications fail?
Generally there can be a lot of reasons. Some of these are:

• Source code corruption (triggered by power failure and sudden shut down of server?)
• Invalid data entry that causes application to crash
• Boundary conditions which causes application to fail
• Lack of disk space
• Wrong permissions in application folders
• … and the list just goes on ……

Simply speaking, all database powered applications need maintenance. Just a negative demonstration….. a working website can suddenly turn temperamental and spout out a whole load of nonsense.

Such things do not happen… but when they do, it sure pays to have a maintenance package to back you up.