Care Plans
Who's taking care of the website that carries your revenue?
If your website carries half to two-thirds of your revenue, and for most small and mid-sized wineries, it does, it has earned the same maintenance discipline as any other piece of critical equipment on your property. Care Plans are that discipline.
It's not a Service. It's a Partnership.
A winery your size can't justify a full-time digital hire, and shouldn't have to. A Care Plan is a share of one: a digital department you don't have to staff, with a named person who knows your property, answers when you call, and puts everything in writing. Nowhere is that more concrete than the Fractional Partner tier.
Three tiers
Essential Care
$395/mo
For wineries under 2,500 cases.
- Isolated VPS hosting. Your own server, not a shared box
- Cloudflare DNS and firewall
- Uptime and performance monitoring
- Managed WordPress updates
- 3-2-1 backups, restore-tested quarterly with a dated certificate
- Quarterly Care Report
Most popular
Managed Care
$895/mo
For roughly 5,000–25,000-case wineries.
- Everything in Essential Care
- Monthly revenue-path check — your checkout, club signup, and every form tested end to end, by hand, so a silent breakage never costs you a month of orders
- Search & Google Business Profile watch — rankings, reviews, and map-pack presence tracked, so slipping visibility gets caught while it’s still cheap to fix
- Routine content updates handled for you — hours, events, new releases: send an email, it gets done. You never log in
- Monthly 45-minute working session — a standing call on what changed and what’s next
- Monthly Care Report and priority response
Fractional Partner
$1,500/mo
A share of a digital department — deliberately limited to a few wineries.
- Everything in Managed Care
- Local SEO campaign — active work on your map-pack rankings, citations, and reviews, not just monitoring
- 3 hours of included hands-on time monthly — and first in line for scheduling
- Quarterly strategy session — the sit-down where next quarter gets planned against your numbers
- The strongest response commitment PDG offers
Somewhere between 2,500 and 5,000 cases? You’re on the line between tiers, and that’s exactly what the free call sorts out. No annual contracts anywhere: every tier is month-to-month.
When something breaks on a Saturday
This is the question that matters most and gets answered the least: if your site goes down on the Saturday of release weekend, what happens?
With a Care Plan, monitoring usually finds the problem before your customers do, and when you call, the person who answers already knows your site. Care Plan clients reach Tom directly, and he already knows your systems. No ticket queue, and no need to re-explain your setup to a stranger.
Priority response, defined: during business hours (Monday–Friday, 9 to 5 Central) you’ll hear back from Tom within one business day on Essential Care, within four business hours on Managed Care, and within two business hours on Fractional Partner — same day for anything touching checkout or club signup. If the site is down or checkout is broken, call. That’s an emergency on every tier, and the person who answers already knows your site.
How billing works...plainly explained
- Questions and email cost nothing. That’s the relationship, not a billable event.
- Hands-on work draws from your included monthly time first, then from purchased credits.
- Included monthly time does not roll over.
- Purchased credits never expire.
- Beyond-scope work is $175/hour, sold in blocks of 5 or 10 hours.
- Everything PDG does can be delivered remotely. On-site visits happen at your request and are quoted in advance: within about three hours of Sandwich, Illinois, mileage at the current IRS rate and nothing more; farther than that, a travel day at the standard hourly rate plus actual travel expenses. Never a surprise on a bill.
What you're really buying
Not the hosting bill, and not the plugin updates. You’re buying the discipline that makes those things provable: a dated, itemized record every month of what was patched, what was blocked, what was restored, and what changed on your site. If you ever sell the winery or hand it to the next generation, that record is part of what you hand over.
The written Standard of Care is the commitment behind every tier.
Questions winery owners actually ask
What is 3-2-1 backup, and why should I care?
Three copies of your site, on two different kinds of storage, with one copy far away from your server. If the server fails, the host has a bad day, or a hack lands, your site exists somewhere the problem can’t reach.
But here’s the part most providers skip: a backup nobody has ever restored is a hope, not a backup. PDG restore-tests backups on a schedule and dates the result — so when something goes wrong, recovery is a procedure that’s been rehearsed, and a bad update costs you an hour instead of your season.
What is VPS hosting, and why is it better than what I have now?
Most winery sites live on shared hosting — one server split between hundreds of strangers’ websites. When somebody else’s site gets busy or gets hacked, yours pays for it: slow pages during your release weekend, or worse.
A VPS (virtual private server) is your own dedicated slice — your resources, your isolation, nobody else’s problems. It’s faster, it’s more secure, and here’s the surprise: it typically costs less than the big-name “premium” shared plans, because you’re paying for a server instead of a brand’s ad budget.
How do Cloudflare, a firewall, and Patchstack actually protect me?
Almost no winery site gets attacked by a person. They get hit by bots scanning thousands of sites an hour for known weaknesses — usually an outdated plugin. The protection is layers: Cloudflare stops junk traffic before it ever reaches your server, the firewall blocks known attack patterns at the door, and Patchstack shields plugin vulnerabilities the moment they’re discovered — often before the plugin’s own fix ships.
The result isn’t “unhackable” — nobody honest promises that. It’s that the automated attacks that catch most small businesses bounce off, and the layers are monitored by someone who will notice.
Has AI changed how customers find wineries?
Yes — and quickly. A growing share of your customers now ask ChatGPT or Google’s AI “best winery near me for a Saturday tasting” and get a recommendation, not ten blue links. The wineries that get recommended are the ones whose facts — hours, location, varietals, events — are written where machines can read and quote them, not trapped in images and sliders.
That’s a structural property of your website, and it’s exactly what PDG builds and maintains for: a site that both Google and AI assistants can understand, cite, and send customers to. The wineries that sort this out early get a head start that’s hard to take back.
Month to month, on purpose
No long-term commitment and no monthly cancellation, because this discipline has to earn its place every month. Start with a free call to find the right tier.
Book a free visibility call