Questions, answered.

Nightshift Lane provides managed website hosting and operations, based in Margaret River, Western Australia, working with small businesses across Australia. We host your website and run it for you: domain, DNS, SSL, hosting, monitoring, backups, security and AI visibility, on a simple fixed monthly fee, so you can stop thinking about it. We also build new sites and automate repetitive web admin where it helps. ABN 45 280 632 686.

We work with small businesses anywhere in Australia: any vertical, any state. Most of our work is done remotely, so location is rarely a constraint. On-site visits are available in the South West of WA; everywhere else is fully remote and works just as well.

A small Margaret River team that brings enterprise technology and operations experience to small business websites. We keep the team deliberately lean so the people who set up your website are the same people who run it day to day.

We do the work while you sleep. The brand is the lit street lamp on a dark cobblestone lane: atmospheric, dependable, always on. Your site is monitored at 2 AM the same way it's monitored at 2 PM.

There are three monthly tiers, plus Watchtower monitoring below them. Foundation ($129/mo), keeps the site online, secure and looked after: managed hosting, domain and DNS, managed SSL, uptime monitoring, automated backups, security maintenance, safe self-service editing for 1 named editor, business-hours priority response and a monthly health summary. Growth ($295/mo), adds AI visibility foundations and tracking, a website enquiry assistant, stronger calls to action and lead capture, and clearer business information for search and answer engines. Partner ($625/mo), adds 2 hours a month of small content updates, a monthly digital operations review, broader website, domain and email coordination, and a 60-minute response if your website goes down, including overnight. Watchtower ($13/mo) is monitoring only for a site hosted elsewhere: uptime and SSL watched, plain-English alert if something breaks, no investigation, repairs or technical support.

Getting started is a separate one-off Setup step, priced and agreed before work begins. Transfer (from $490) is a like-for-like move of your current site onto our managed platform, no redesign. Refresh transfers your site and improves it as part of the move. Build (from $1,490) is a brand-new website with 1 year of a standard domain included. Full Setup pricing is on the pricing page. Your monthly plan and your Setup step are separate decisions: after getting started you run on whichever monthly tier suits, or on Watchtower ($13/mo) if the site is hosted elsewhere.

AI Visibility is included in Growth and Partner rather than sold separately. AI Receptionist from $129/$199/$349/mo (any tier). Email Health and Deliverability from $750 setup plus $99/mo, or a rescue from $1,500. Google Business Profile setup at $300 standalone, or it may be included with Growth or Partner onboarding. An extra content editor at $19/editor/mo (each plan includes 1). Specialist SSL priced on review. Business email on your own domain from $8/user/mo, or Microsoft 365 from $12/user/mo, set up, migrated and managed for you. A large online store quoted to your catalogue.

AI Visibility (sometimes called Answer Engine Optimisation, or AEO) is about making your business easy to understand for AI-powered search and answer tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, as well as for search engines. AI visibility builds on good SEO, structured content and clear business information; it does not replace them. We add structured-data markup, clear business and FAQ information and, where useful, an llms.txt file, and each month we check whether your business appears in a sample of AI answers for the questions your customers ask. We report what we see. We do not promise that any AI tool will recommend you.

They overlap more than the names suggest. SEO focuses on search engine results pages; AI visibility looks at the written answers AI tools give. Both rest on the same foundations: a well-built site, structured data, clear business information and useful content. AEO is not a replacement for SEO, and good SEO is still the starting point. The main addition is monitoring: we also check how your business appears across AI-powered search and answer platforms.

Yes. Our managed tiers include technical SEO as part of the service: page metadata, structured data, sitemap, robots.txt, internal linking, and ongoing content updates on the higher tiers. AI Visibility (included in Growth and Partner) adds AI-engine optimisation on top of that. We focus on technical SEO and content quality rather than link-buying schemes.

Watchtower is the closest: $13/mo, we monitor your existing site and keep an eye on uptime, SSL and security. We do not host it on Watchtower; we monitor it. We do not offer pure unmanaged hosting because the value comes from us owning the whole stack and being accountable for it.

Yes, anytime, both directions. Many businesses start on Foundation to keep the site running and move up to Growth or Partner as they want more visibility, content updates and support. Watchtower customers often move onto a managed tier after the first alert and realise their site needs more active attention. Moving up or down changes your monthly support level; it does not change a one-off Foundation amount already agreed.

It means the layout is designed for the smallest screen first (a portrait phone) and progressively enhanced for larger screens. In code, every base style targets mobile by default, and overrides only kick in at tablet/desktop breakpoints. The result: faster load on phones, simpler decisions about what's truly essential, no 'desktop site that's been squeezed onto mobile' feel. A large share of customers now browse small-business sites on phones, so we design mobile-first.

Every site is Next.js (React) deployed on Vercel, with Cloudflare DNS and SSL. The app router, server components, image optimisation, and edge functions give us very fast page loads with very low operational overhead. For commerce we use Stripe Products + Checkout. For databases we use Neon Postgres (serverless). For email we use Microsoft 365 and Resend. The tech stack is modern, efficient, reliable and well-supported with strong industry reputation

WordPress is a content management system from 2003 with a plugin ecosystem that creates security, performance, and maintenance headaches. Next.js is a modern web framework that produces small, fast, secure sites with no plugin sprawl. For most small businesses we build for, Next.js gives a better outcome: faster pages, better SEO, less to break, lower lifetime cost. WordPress still makes sense for very content-heavy sites with multiple author logins; we'll tell you honestly if that's you.

Our target is a Lighthouse Performance score of 90+ on every page, with a page load under three seconds on a mid-range phone over 4G. Most builds clear 95+. We measure this nightly and flag regressions in the monthly report.

Every site we manage gets a defined security baseline and ongoing patching: HTTPS via Cloudflare, automatic SSL renewal, modern security headers (HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy), and deploys via Vercel's immutable deployment model: no SSH access, no FTP credentials to leak, no PHP plugin to get pwned. We monitor SSL expiry and security headers nightly.

Every site we build is mobile-first and tested across the five common viewport widths (375, 768, 1024, 1440, 1920px). Touch targets are sized for fingers, scrolling is vertical-by-default, and we never use hover-only interactions. If it doesn't work cleanly on a phone, we don't ship it.

We aim for WCAG 2.2 AA compliance on every site. That means proper semantic HTML, alt text on images, sufficient colour contrast, keyboard navigation, focus indicators, and ARIA labels where they help. The Lighthouse Accessibility score is part of every monthly report.

You give us your URL; we run a full scan covering Lighthouse performance, accessibility and SEO scores, security headers, SSL status, technology stack analysis, and an AI readiness check (how clearly your site gives AI tools the structured information they can use). We send you a PDF report within one business day. No obligation, no follow-up calls unless you ask.

Most new website builds are live within 1-2 weeks from project start. Day 1-3: design + content review. Day 4-8: build + iteration. Day 9-10: migration, testing, go-live. A like-for-like Transfer is quicker: we are not redesigning, we are moving the existing site onto our managed platform and starting to manage it.

Yes. Every new build is reviewed at a preview URL on our managed platform before we transfer your domain. You get to click through every page, check the copy, see it on your phone, and request changes. The domain only flips to the new site when you say so.

On a new build, yes. We will write the standard pages from a brief and your existing materials, then you edit. For deeper content work (blog posts, landing pages, case studies), we quote it as custom work.

Yes, always. Your domain registration stays in your name with your registrar of choice. We point the nameservers to our Cloudflare account so we can manage DNS for you, but if you ever leave we hand the nameservers back and you're free.

You own the finished website, your content, your data and the site-specific work you paid for. During the engagement the site lives in a private GitHub repository we hold; if you leave, we transfer that repository to your GitHub or hand you a full export, along with the database (Neon Postgres) and your assets. Our internal tooling (monitoring, audit engine, generators, reusable components and libraries) stays ours; where your site uses any of it, you keep a perpetual licence to use it in your business, as set out in our Terms.

30 days notice, no penalties, no exit fees. We hand back domain control, transfer the GitHub repo, export the database, document any third-party services (Stripe, Resend, Cloudflare), and provide credentials. No lock-in tricks. We have designed the operation so a leaving customer is a sad event but never a hostage situation.

Your site is designed to be portable rather than locked to Nightshift Lane. It runs on established third-party infrastructure (Vercel and Cloudflare), not a server in our garage, and we maintain a handover path for your code, domain, DNS, data and service configuration so another provider can take over. Every customer would receive their full handover pack as our exit step.

No long-term contract. Every monthly plan is month-to-month with 30 days notice to cancel. Getting started is a separate one-off Setup step (Transfer, Refresh or Build), agreed before work begins and paid as a deposit before work starts (non-refundable once work begins) plus the balance once you approve your site, before it goes live; the recurring monthly plan can be cancelled anytime. Your monthly plan and your Setup step are priced separately.

No. The prices on the website are the final price. Nightshift Lane is currently below the $75K turnover GST registration threshold, so GST is not added. When we register for GST, we will show it separately and let existing clients know before anything changes.

Card via Stripe Checkout (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Apple Pay, Google Pay) or direct bank transfer using the NAB account details on your invoice. Bank transfer is preferred for ongoing managed-services subscriptions to avoid 1.7% Stripe fees.

Recurring monthly fees are billed monthly in advance on the 1st of the month. The one-off Setup step is paid in two parts: a deposit, invoiced at project start and due before work begins, and the balance, once you have reviewed and approved your site at a private preview link and before it goes live. The deposit amount is set in your proposal. Add-ons follow the same cadence: monthly add-ons join the monthly invoice, one-off add-ons are invoiced when the work starts.

Recurring fees are not pro-rated on cancellation, but no further charges apply once you cancel, so the worst case is you pay for one month after deciding to leave. The Setup deposit is non-refundable once work begins (typically within 24 hours of project start).

Email connect@nightshiftlane.com. Response is same business day for email. Partner includes a 60-minute response if your website goes down, including overnight; other urgent issues follow the response times in the SLA. Out-of-hours we monitor critical alerts via push notification, so a site outage alerts us at any time of day.

HTTP availability and response time, SSL certificate validity and expiry, DNS resolution, security header presence, Lighthouse performance/accessibility/best-practices/SEO scores, and AI visibility. The higher tiers also get weekly Lighthouse trend analysis and security header drift alerts, and AI visibility tracking is included from Growth up.

Uptime percentage for the month, Lighthouse score trends, SSL expiry countdown, security headers status, Core Web Vitals trends, work completed (from changelog), issues detected and resolved, and recommendations. On Growth and Partner plans it also shows how many people visited your site, which pages they looked at, and where they came from. PDF, delivered to your email early each month, no later than the 7th.

Our automated monitoring and alerting system runs 60-second uptime checks from our Australian-based data centre, plus nightly health checks for everything else (SSL expiry, security headers, and performance). Australian-based monitoring means the measurements reflect what your real Australian visitors experience.