By Chris on Monday, 12 January 2015
Category: Website Design

Why do I need ongoing website support?

One of the standard features of our website packages is that they all include at least 12 months support to help you make the most of your website.

Having a website is a great business investment, however even if it does not get updated content regularly, there are a number of things that we do to make sure your website stays secure and compatible with changes to browser technology:

Website file and software updates

If your website is based on a content management system such as Joomla or WordPress, updates and security fixes are released on a regular schedule each year.  As well as keeping your website secure from malicious visitors, these updates often bring improved compatibility with new and emerging browsers as well as adding new functionality or features to make your website even better.

Ensuring these updates do not conflict with any other parts of your website, such as e-commerce solutions, is a critical part of our service - with our managed support, we take full backups of your website and database before any updates are performed, and ensure we check for any known issues or incompatibilities before proceeding.  In the unlikely event of anything going wrong, we can roll your website back to the last backup within minutes and then perform further investigation into the issue to resolve it before performing a working update.

Managing this yourself can be time consuming and complex, so our ongoing website maintenance plans ensure we have everything covered on your behalf.

Backups

Al of our websites are created with a commercial automated backup solution built in.  Depending on the nature of your website, it will be backed up at least weekly, and for e-commerce websites, each night.

In the unlikely event of a problem, we can restore the last backup within minutes, getting your website up and running again with as little downtime as possible.

Backups are essential for any website, and even more essential for those websites with regularly changing content from blogs, e-commerce sales and event bookings.  With our automated backup solution, you can be sure that the chances of losing your important content and information are minimised without the need for worry.

Extension licence renewals

For e-commerce websites or those with features such as blogs, car sales, hotel bookings or other extended features, there can be expensive licencing costs to provide updates and support with issues that may arise when using them.

This cost is built in to your maintenance plan, and because we have preferential rates, it would cost you significantly more to licence these yourself than it is to retain our support after the end of Year 1.  Without up to date licences, access to security and issue fixes is denied, so you risk being left with an insecure and broken website.  Updates to such features are often required when new versions of the underlying content management system are released, so it is critical to ensure you have access to these updates to keep your website working and prevent compatibility problems.

As always, all of this is managed on your behalf.  Where new features are brought out, or the methods of managing parts of your website change, we provide full information and guidance on making best use of these changes and making sure you understand how to continue doing things as normal if the method changes.

This process is directly linked to our backup solution - full backups are taken before any updates, with compatibility checks made beforehand to reduce the likelihood of problems.  In the rare situation where anything goes wrong, we can roll back to the last backup within minutes.

Individual hosting

Many website hosting packages use shared hosting - this means that if someone else's website was hacked on the same server as yours, there is the chance that the attacker can gain access to all other websites on the same server and also attack them.

With our hosting, every single website uses a dedicated hosting account so this type of attack cannot occur.  The hosting solution uses a number of security solutions which are unique to their platform, which is dedicated to running our choice of content management system.  It includes not only software security setup correctly within the website file structure, it also includes active protection which maintains real-time protection against malicious access to your website.

Final words

Whilst you are always able to take your website to another hosting provider and leave our support at the end of Year 1, we believe that our support and maintenance, included as standard for everyone under contract, offers a significantly important amount of work throughout the year to ensure that your website is up to date and secure at all times.

We feel that as a website owner, all you should need to worry about is making the most of your business, and not whether the last backup of your website ran successfully!

If you have any questions about our support services, do not hesitate to get in touch!

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