Please note: no one solution is perfect for every type of client. It’s why we have a few hosts in particular that we choose to work with depending on the project. But as a customer, you should know that you have options, too, whether your concerns are financial, performance, or purely based on up-time monitoring and support.

Support

One of the most critical things to consider is support for your website. The purpose of your website and its goals, whether it’s just for informational purposes or fuels your business, will affect how much support you need. For example, available support hours and type of support offered will vary from host to host and could even vary plan to plan. So, if your business is purely digital and your team is distributed across the nation or even the globe, then ensuring you have access to human support 24/7 is probably critical. You don’t want to be left out in the cold when trying to get a hold of someone at 3 a.m. should your site go down.

Alternatively, maybe hours of support isn’t your concern, but rather how you communicate. Some hosts offer chat support, while others offer a ticket-based service, which operates a little bit slower, like emailing back and forth. There may even be options for phone support, but that varies from host to host. If those are things that are important to you, you should find a host that will support you in the way that you need it the most.

SLA

In the same vein as support, a service level agreement (SLA), is going to indicate what type of guarantee you receive from your host to stay online. Often times, it fluctuates from host to host; so you need to ensure that your SLA covers what is most important to you. Be mindful of whether or not the SLA covers network availability, is an infrastructure guarantee, or if it’s on the hardware. It’s possible that the SLA could cover all, or just some of those. But again, it’s important for you to know what type of SLA your host operates under, so you know what is and isn’t covered by the agreement.

Technology

Most often than not, your hosting provider is purchasing their technology (aka infrastructure) from someone else. In the case of purchasing hosting directly from Rackspace or Amazon Web Services, for example, you’re purchasing directly from the source. However, most managed hosting companies are just reselling infrastructure with their own tools and optimizations built on top of it. This is totally acceptable. That’s the trade-off when you go direct to the infrastructure; you don’t generally get as many tools or platform-specific (WordPress) support. But certain technologies provide certain features that will vary depending on the type of service you need.

Let’s say that you need highly scalable architecture, ensuring that the technology behind your host (aside from SLA, customer support, etc.) is able to sustain the amount of traffic and load that your site requires from their technology. Most hosts these days disclose who their technology provider is, but if they don’t, it doesn’t hurt to ask. From there, you can better identify what type of infrastructure will be powering your site.

Performance

This goes hand-in-hand with the technology but also includes the unique optimizations that your host might build on top of that tech infrastructure. For example, a lot of the hosts that we partner with have their own mix for performance and optimization, which is why they’ve become so successful as brands.

It’s no secret that SEO is important for your site to succeed, and the easier it is for someone to get to your site and get the information they need, whether it’s a human or a bot, is going to net you better rankings. Fast sites historically perform better. So if having a good user experience and ranking higher on Google is a concern for you, then looking into the performance of the host is going to be of major importance.

There are also statistics that prove that the longer it takes for your site to load, the more likely someone is going to abandon your site and get their information elsewhere. And with hundreds of thousands of sites sharing similar content, we’re conditioned to getting information as quickly as possible. If you want to keep readers and visitors on your site, looking for a highly performant host is critical.

Backup

Backups are pretty standard these days, but be mindful of how long those backups exist and how easy it is for you to access them. Just because your host is taking a backup doesn’t mean it will be helpful for you if you need to implement it, which plays into the support angle. When you need to retrieve a backup, it’s usually at a critical point. It’s one thing to know you have a backup, but another thing to actually restore a backup.

Backups come in handy for a number of cases—just keeping a running copy of your site if you have to revert for any reason, especially when WordPress and plugin updates are released. Some hosts even remind you to perform a backup before every update you make to your site. Imagine drafting a bunch of blog posts only to find that a WordPress update broke your site! If you hadn’t made a backup, you would have lost all of those draft blog posts. Backups are there to do just that: backup your site and act as a safety net. So finding a host whose backup policy works for you, or even just being more mindful of what type of backup support you need, can set you up for success.

Dev Tools

Depending on what type of site you’re operating, you may or may not care about developer tools. But if you have a team of devs, or even a singular developer, the tools that a hosting provider offers can make a difference.

Staging sites, analytic tools to help you understand how your site and content are performing, or even things like more complex things like GIT integration can affect development workflow. Some hosts can be pretty restrictive with code reviews or force you to use their workflow. We try to recommend hosts that we’ve had great experiences with ourselves, so we’re not throwing you into the deep end with anything unverified.

Control Panel

One of the most underrated but simplest things to keep in mind is the control panel. Again, its importance depends on how much time you plan to actually spend on your site, but the experience could be dramatically different if you have only one website versus managing 10. How easy is it to get support, to the resources that you need, to access the tools, or even have the visibility over the performance of your accounts?

Having a control panel is like having the best navigation system for your car. A basic one will get you from point A to point B, but a souped-up one is going to give you more insight, more knowledge, and more tools to do more with your site.

To reiterate, there are a lot of variables to consider, which means that no one host is a perfect for no one client. Thankfully, our team works with the best of the best to provide you a great recommendation based on your needs. Consider what we outlined, think about your unique site needs and whether or not your current hosting solution is supporting you in the way in which you prefer to be supported. If it isn’t, our team is always happy to help talk you through options and point you in the right direction. Contact us today.

The post Things to Consider When Searching for a Website Host appeared first on WebDevStudios.

My iPhone, laptop, even a new air purifier I recently purchased all had the option to buy some form of a maintenance plan. I’ve never regretted purchasing one because while I’d like to think of myself as responsible, I’m far from graceful. Working in the tech industry now as the Director of Client Strategy at WDS, I’m often asked whether or not an ongoing website maintenance and support plan for a website is necessary. My answer is always the same, “Absolutely.”

I understand being hesitant to engage in this extra expense. I’ll be the first to admit that YouTube tutorials, online classes, and documentation have me believing that I’m an expert developer at times; and while these tools are helpful, they don’t always account for the unexpected. There are many reasons why ongoing support is critical but let me just share a few.

Plugin, Theme, and WordPress Updates

All of the code that goes into making WordPress work is often referred to as the “core.” WordPress sends out updates a few times a year to ensure that the core is always in tip-top shape. Some releases are small, but some are important, containing things like critical security updates. Every update is worth taking seriously.

Plugins are created by this amazing open source community to extend the functionality of your website. Plugins can update more or less frequently depending on how engaged the developer is in improving the tool.

There’s also your website theme to think about. Whether you’re using a free or premium one, chances are that as WordPress releases new updates, so will your theme.

I hesitate to hit that “update” button sometimes. You don’t always know how your website will be affected. While most agencies develop websites to be as update-proof as possible, there are no guarantees. Having a professional on deck to handle these updates for you is critical in the ultimate performance and health of your website.

Security

Hacking: it’s a term we are all familiar with. A quick look at the news and there is a story of some website being hacked somewhere. There are numerous measures you can take to protect your website. Some are easy and could merely require a plugin, but others tend to be a bit more complex. With ongoing support, trusted professionals will ensure the health of your website. One thing you may want to consider is if your website is being monitored on a regular basis. Constant security scans alert the website owner if a file has been tampered with, if there are irregular logins, or even if there have been DNS changes. Regular monitoring can detect if these changes are out of the ordinary and quickly put things back to normal.

Backups

Here is a typical scenario—you hire someone new to work on your website. It could be a new developer or maybe someone just adding content. They are given more access than they need, and accidentally something happens, and your site is not looking like it should. If you have regular backups being performed on your website, restoring to the last one should be a painless process. Without backups, you are in for a ton of investigation and work. Having regularly scheduled backups is the insurance policy you need most.

Big and Small Changes

The real hero of a maintenance and support plan us simply having access to a team of experts available to help. That form you want to add to the website, those images that you just haven’t had a chance to upload, the new ads you want to put on the homepage; with a support team, it’s as simple as letting them know your plans and then allowing them to take it from there. Think of your support team as an extension of your business. They are here to support you. No task is too small or large.

This may seem like a lot, and it is. There is no need to tackle all of this yourself. That’s why WDS has Maintainn. At Maintainn, a brilliant team of support specialists is there to answer your questions, help plan for changes, secure your website, back it up regularly, and update it consistently. All of this is to ensure you have a high performant and rock-solid website. Not only does this bring you peace of mind but it also assures your visitors are enjoying their experience. Yeah, there may be some additional investment, but it can’t compare to the investment needed if these safeguards are not in place.

The post Ongoing Website Maintenance: Why the Transition from WDS to Maintainn Makes Sense appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Sometime ago I was dealing with brute force attacks, and during that time, I thought it was fun to out-wit my attackers. Admittedly, for a while, it was. Down the road I went, with CloudFlare to handle most bots, as well as some general security measures of my own such as moving my login, disabling XML-RPC, installing WangGuard, and a few other scripts I wrote myself.

Lately, I’ve been getting more into actual system administration and learning the ins and outs of a Linux server environment. I started out with Apache (xampp) and evolved into a full-blown dedicated system in Canada. This server holds two Minecraft servers, my remote development environment, my personal website, and a few random databases I use for various side-projects.

On Wednesday March 30th, 2016, my MySQL database filled up, thanks to a sizable database file (1-2 GB) from one of our clients. Historically, during development, I try to mimic the live site of a client as closely as possible. This ensures there aren’t any data integrity issues and guarantees I’m not missing anything.

Well, I realize 1-2 GB isn’t that large when it comes to a database, but considering the fact that I had been working on multiple other projects at the time, as well as my personal data, and add that to the fact that a properly configured Minecraft server can create a significant amount of data in the database with the right logging software.

Well. Whoops. Server apocalypse.

How did this happen?

It’s a culmination of multiple things, the first of which was the MySQL database was mounted in the WRONG location. The second and less controllable external factors being the writing to the database from the Minecraft Server, as well as a few cron jobs I had going, and then the new client database that was imported.

The Server-pocalypse

On to my next mistake! After a lengthy call with Parbs (in my opinion, he is THE guy to go to for server problems), we came up with a solution to move the /var folder over to /home/var, which is where the bulk of my free space existed. After re-initializing mariaDB, I saw my main site come up. Whoa, it worked!

Of course, I checked a few other sites and still saw a db error, but I wrote if off as a whatever because it was end of the day and I wanted to get some R&R in.

Due to my never-ending quest for knowledge, later that night I returned to try to ‘figure’ out the reason the other sites were offline (database issues) while my main site was fine. It NEVER occurred to me the tables may have crashed.

My process went like so:

1. Google the shiz outta my problem
2. Proceed to run random commands from StackOverflow…that were from 2006
3. Kill the server

So how did I kill the server?

Well, first off, if you ever want to break something, take the advice of the internet at face value and do no investigation on your own! That’s pretty much the easiest way to destroy something. I don’t do it when it comes to code, so why I did it for the server issue, I’ll never know.

I ended up mounting a folder ONTO itself (which, up until this point, I didn’t even know that was possible) with symlinks. In the end, I was like “Oh, I don’t need this symlink,” and simply did this: rm -fR /home/var.

deleted my MAIN /var folder, which by default is where MySQL stores its data, which is /var/lib/mysql.

The Aftermath

Well, you can imagine what happens when you delete 20GB worth of data with ZERO backups.

My main site to this day is still offline. I ended up having to flex some time so I could, at minimum, get my development environment online, and of course, my gaming servers (with 100+ players) were offline for two days. As I’m sure you could predict, I had some very unhappy people.

It was during this time I realized I knew nothing about Nginx vs Apache servers. I’m an Apache guy, but making the move to Nginx due to the server wipe was, at least I thought, the logical thing to do. I ended up staying up until 3:30am the day the apocalypse hit, and then spending a chunk of the following day to finish on-lining my development environment, which consisted of me trying and failing to set up Nginx server directives, restarting the server hundreds of times, and finally uploading a 20GB database, and about 130GB worth of files which ate my bandwidth all day.

What I Learned

Don’t touch anything without talking to Brad Parbs first!

In all seriousness: We say it again and again, and we hear it again and again, but even those of us who are professional devs can forget the importance of one very crucial thing: BACKUPS!!! Get a backup system that works. If you’re on a managed server more than likely you already have this. I, however was not, and felt the agony of a server-pocalypse.

One thing I’ve had trouble finding is a good system backup/restore system for remote servers. Anyone out there have a recommendation?

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