Hosting:
Client Expander has a powerful Quad Core Designated Server housed via SingleHop at the Digital Realty Trust data center in Chicago- a center fortified to operate in all conceivable situations. There are 4 independent connections from the center to the Web, to minimize the chance of any natural disaster affecting the uptime of the websites. And, the battery UPS backup for the facility is industry leading- keeping our servers running even during power outages. The server is an advanced machine with dual redundant hard drives, which ensures that if one hard drive fails that the other will seamlessly pick up the slack. Backups are made regularly and saved to an off-site server as well as to DropBox. Thus, all of our websites are saved on 4 separate hard drives across three locations- providing us with the set-up necessary to minimize the chance of downtime and the system to help recover quickly if things were to go wrong.
We’ve installed WebP and Google Page Speed tools to the server as part of our advanced optimization set-up, ensuring that our client’s image heavy websites load quickly and efficiently.
Site Maintenance:
As a website is only as safe as its security measures, we keep WordPress and plugins updated. The updating process often causes issues in the CSS (the visual design aspect of the site’s code) and with the plugins, and thus we follow a thorough updating process that ensures that goes far beyond pushing that simple, yet dangerous, update button. We do the updates in carefully executed process: prepare a backed-up version of the site to go live in case something breaks, then our coder does the update, our Quality Assurance (QA) Specialist goes through all of the major pages and each type of post making sure nothing has visually changed and testing that everything still works properly (including the all-important contact form), and our coder works to fix up any issues that may have happened, and then we do a final round of QA. Our QA process also gives us a regular opportunity to look at our client’s sites with fresh eyes, looking for issues or areas that can be improved.
Regular updating significantly reduces the chance of getting your site hacked. This package comes with a guarantee of your site not getting hacked. If a hack happens, we take responsibility for it and fix it without additional invoicing- which can save hundreds, even a thousand, dollars.
Terms:
We offer this Hosting and Site Maintenance Package for $50/month- which is at-cost. We want to keep it easy for our clients to say “yes!” to this very important service.
This does not include email hosting- which we recommend is done through Google Apps– or the optional https security.
This agreement is for the one-time server migration and monthly hosting and site maintenance, as described above.
