So you own a website, now what?

There is an old adage - "If you're not living you're dying".  This is also true of websites.  Websites require monthly maintenance as a rule, enterprise websites are monitored daily, and almost all websites need to be reactive to security threats and upgrade warnings.

Web Hosting

Web Hosting is commonly talked about as if it was all the same.  The reality is that there are vastly different types of web hosting.

The most common form of hosting is low cost shared web hosting.  This form of hosting typically has several hundred and more commonly several thousand websites all using the same bandwidth, computer processors, hard drives, and RAM.  The cheapest ones are located in the USA and some third world countries. These web hosts allocate a single shared IP address (its like a post office box that everyone uses), a limited amount of hard drive, and a fragment of RAM and processor power.  The servers that host these websites severely restrict the RAM, harddrive, processor threads your website can use..  If your website is expected to be more than a brochure website and you don't want it to be very slow then cheap shared hosting or overseas web hosting is not for you.

Interweaving shares its dedicated servers across a very limited number of clients based on their monitored resource needs.  The servers are optimised to be used with our content management systems with support for database hungry applications.  The specification for the servers we share with our clients is extremely high by industry standards.  These servers are located in Australia. This means that organisations with customers primarily in Australia will have the fastest service possible with virtually no lag.  Your clients wont have long waits to be allocated a processor, struggle with RAM, or bandwidth.  These are new top of the line servers which are over-configured to ensure that websites are served in the optimum conditions.

Having a unique IP address located in Australia is essential to your organisation.  You cannot properly secure your website for e-commerce and privacy unless you have your own unique IP address, and search engines will give you preferential listings on searches coming from Australian residents if your IP is also in Australia.  Interweaving has 60 unique dedicated IP addresses which are available for clients that believe Search Engine Optimised Hosting is important.

Website Maintenance

The Internet is a still quite a wild place.  It has frequent security threats and the working environment changes constantly.  Various web browsers and software companies often change their systems and many of them don't follow established web standards.  Microsoft with the Internet Explorer 6 web browser chose to ignore most of the established web standards in order to try and monopolise the browser market a few years ago.  They failed but this has led to many web applications not showing up properly in Internet Explorer to this day.

Web Hosting is generally well maintained within professional web hosting companies.  However, they are not responsible for keeping your website up to date. Typically, once a web developer turns over a website to a client - that responsibility is up to the client for ongoing maintenance. There is one disadvantage with having access to so much technology within a CMS system and that is that each and every programming component needs to be maintained.  Each program actually has its own security vulnerabilities and upgrade issues which need to be individually monitored to keep up with the changes in the Internet.  This creates quite a burden for most website owners which is why Interweaving believes that website maintenance should be an integrated part of managed hosting.

Interweaving monitors all of the program upgrades and security alerts, and then upgrades, maintains, and repairs as required.  One added benefit is that a single upgrade can potentially disable your whole system if done incorrectly.   Interweaving controls a wide variety of websites that all use the same content management system. As many of the same modules are used between websites we have developed, it is cost effective for us to maintain everyone's system as a service - so they don't have to.  Most maintenance by nature is reactive maintenance and cleaning up system artifacts.

Optimisation

Optimisation comes in many forms.  It is creating proactive change to improve, rather than maintain a website.  It involves search engine optimisation of website content; security optimisation to prevent commerce and privacy breeches; server and database optimisation to improve speed, performance, and reliability; and content editing to groom new content as it is added to the system.  Optimisation also offers the development team a chance to review and recommend installation of new technology or upgrades of technology that are already used on your system.  Most of the time these upgrades, as part of a management program, cost very little to keep up to date.

Support

Once your website is created - then what?  What if you have questions? Something breaks? Ghosts start showing up in the machine?  Even great website administrators need help on a regular basis.  That's ok Interweaving is here to help.  Although generous timed support is part of each web development package eventually you may run out of support time.  That isn't really something to worry about we honestly want to help.  Here is a good tip: if you save a number of queries you have then discuss them all at the same time - your support hours will last much longer than a long series of single queries.

We will call you to see how your going on a regular basis too.  Feel free to ask us any questions you would like for free when we do!

For questions about managed web hosting and professional web maintenance please book a free consultation.

Web Hosting

Web hosting is the infrastructure and software to manage the communication of your website to the internet at large. It also provides the security and speed on how that message is communicated. Interweaving provides specialist web hosting services for content management systems or we can arrange for your website to be moved once developed.

Reasons why clients may prefer to use Interweaving web hosting:

• Interweaving provides hosting specific to the content management system and technology it develops. This system has specific speed, security, and software requirements. The interweaving host is optimised specifically to these systems. Equally it disabled the use of technology from attacks utilising software not required for Interweaving clients.

• Sometimes client websites require specific technology or access which is not allowed on larger hosting companies. Bulk email systems, real time messaging, video broadcast, data streaming, data downloads, and timed events are all common technologies utilised which most large web hosting companies will not accommodate without significant costs. Some websites don’t require these services.

• Websites typically require security patches and optimisation that web hosting companies don’t provide. Web hosting companies don’t service the websites themselves. Interweaving provides common website software patches and optimisation as a low cost optional service to its clients. Without this service the website progressively get out of date and lose security integrity. Although Interweaving can provide this service to websites on external hosts the costs are significantly more as the time it takes to maintain them is more time consuming and prone to issues.

• External web hosts may backup a client’s website at an additional cost to the client. However, should the client need to restore the backup the fees typically start at $180 and grow quickly. That assumes that the host has saved the backup less recently than the issue. Sometimes these issues coincide with backup cycles and there are not any patent copies of the website. Client’s can backup their own websites. Interweaving provides the backup software in their website administration area. However, many forget or accidently corrupt the backup download. Interweaving backs up its client websites monthly for a fee. These copies are kept for two months to ensure a valid copy. They are formatted in a way that can be easily transported and re-established at another host quickly. This is a backup specific to restoration of the content management system used by Interweaving. This isn’t available at external web hosts.

• Most websites hosted with Interweaving are hosted on their own unique IP address for a fee. This is a very unique service now as IP addresses have become rare. Interweaving has to pay for access to these unique IP addresses each month. One of the criteria for search engine optimisation is to have a unique IP address. If SEO is important to your website it should be considered. Obtaining access to a unique IP address at another external host may be very difficult if not impossible.

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