This policy applies in addition to the terms set out in our standard terms and conditions policy. This policy is valid from 1st January 2026.

Summary of services

Fruit Bowl Co is a creative and marketing agency. We provide managed hosting services to ensure the websites we build perform at their best.

To achieve this, we partner with top-tier third-party providers. In short:

Us

We manage configuration, automated updates, and security for your hosting environments. We will provide up to three hosting environments per website: live, testing, and development.

The providers

We use WP Engine for core hosting, Cloudflare for network reliability and security, and dedicated providers like SendGrid or Mailgun to ensure your transactional emails aren’t marked as spam.

Managed hosting with WP Engine

Our hosting service is billed either monthly or annually. If you choose our discounted annual rate, you are committed to that 12-month period. Our managed hosting environment includes:

• Automated updates: We manage automated WordPress core and plugin updates to keep your site secure.
• Performance layers: We use ElasticPress on larger sites to ensure quick site loading and high-performance search functionality.
• Network security: All hosting includes the Cloudflare network to protect against digital threats and ensure site reliability.

Transactional email & deliverability

Due to server limitations, we use third-party providers (typically SendGrid or Mailgun) to send emails from your website, such as contact form notifications and customer receipts.

This is essential for ensuring your emails actually reach their destination and are not filtered as spam. It is a requirement of our hosting partner, WP Engine.

We charge a modest service fee that covers setting up and maintaining the system, as well as the cost of sending the emails.

These services are for transactional emails only; we can arrange a separate marketing campaign.

Monitoring & optimisations

To keep your site “healthy” and fast, we include several background services:

• Performance monitoring: We use Sentry or PostHog to monitor your website in real-time, ensuring it runs smoothly and that errors are caught before they affect your users.
• Image optimisation: We utilise TinyPNG to automatically optimise every image uploaded to your site. This reduces page load times and improves customer conversion rates.
• Anti-spam: We deploy Akismet to protect your site from being bombarded with spam comments and fraudulent form submissions.

Licenses & compliance

Plugin licenses

We manage annual licenses for essential tools like Advanced Custom Fields Pro and Formidable Forms.

Keeping these up to date is a non-optional requirement for maintaining site functionality and user privacy.

Your specific website or projects may require additional licenses. We will specify these in your invoices.

GDPR compliance

For sites that require cookie consent management, we use Civic Cookie Control to ensure compliance with legal data protection requirements.

We charge a modest fee for the CMP setup in Google Tag Manager and for maintaining your GDPR compliance. We do not take any responsibility for errors, fees or liabilities incurred as a result of our provision of these services.

Limitations of liability

Service uptime: While we use top-tier providers like WP Engine, we do not own the data centres or the underlying infrastructure. Therefore, Fruit Bowl Co cannot be held liable for incidental or consequential damages resulting from third-party service outages.

Server management: Once your site is set up, the ongoing management of specific DNS changes or email accounts remains your responsibility unless a specific management agreement is in place. We are happy to manage these elements for you, for a small additional fee.

Backups: Our hosting partner WP Engine takes daily backups of every environment. We are not responsible if these backups fail.

Fees & payments

Hosting and subscription fees are subject to a 20% VAT rate.

Payments are due as per your invoice terms, and failing to pay promptly may result in the suspension of these vital third-party services.