What does managed website hosting mean? Well, here at R5 Website Management, we take a hands-on approach to managing your site and making sure it doesn’t go down. When you work with a big-name hosting company like GoDaddy or Bluehost, the only thing they do is give your website a place to live. But, they are hands off. If your site goes down, they don’t tell you. If your site gets hacked…same.
What Services Are Part of Managed Website Hosting?
I can only speak for R5 Website Management when I talk about what comes as part of managed website hosting. Here’s what we do for our clients.
WordPress Hosting
There was a time we were GoDaddy resellers and put everyone on GoDaddy hosting. But, several years ago, we got away from that because it was not a solid hosting solution. At the time of writing this blog, we are using Cloudways hosting. The reason we switched is that we have a lot more control over the servers.
This means if a website is using a lot more resources all of a sudden, we have the ability to go fix it. For example, if a website comes under attack from bot traffic, it is suddenly going to take up a lot of server resources…creating slowdowns for all of the sites on that server. When this happens, we have several courses of action we can take to solve the problem.
Unlike a big company like Host Gator, WPX, etc., we have your site hooked into monitors that will tell us if there are problems or if your site goes down. We immediately go fix it.
Safe WordPress Plugin Updates
Plugins are like apps on your phone or programs on your computer that have to be updated to keep the site working. Have you ever updated an app and dealt with glitches? The same thing can happen with WordPress updates. If you run automatic updates on your plugins, they can create glitches and take the site down or break things on the site.
The best way to update plugins is to have someone manually do this. We use ManageWP to run a backup of the site before we make the updates each week. Then, we compare the updated site to the copy of the site we took to make sure it didn’t break anything. There are plenty of times issues occur, and we immediately restore the site before the update and figure out why this is an issue.
Uptime Monitoring
We use something called Robotalp to monitor all of our sites. Now this service is for more than just WordPress websites. We actually put all sites we work on in Robotalp in case something happens and the site goes down. If we get notified the site is down and we don’t host it, we can at least alert our clients to go to their host or platform to tell them.
The other thing this monitoring does is alert us if major changes happen on the site. Say someone’s site automatically updates and something breaks, we’ll be notified that major changes have happened on the site. We set up these monitors so that we can be alerted to issues with the site so someone doesn’t happen by and realize there’s a problem. It’s not foolproof, but it does reduce the number of times we’ve seen issues on a site.
Backups with a 90-day Archive
A website backup is basically a copy of the site. It’s important to have a copy of your site for many reasons, such as:
- You forget to pay for your domain name and your site goes down.
- The site gets infected with malware and a copy needs to be restored.
- Your hosting lapses and you lose your site.
- Someone on your team does something that breaks the site.
Of course, if you are on our managed hosting plan, you’re not going to lose your site because of hosting. But, this is just a few examples of what could happen where you need a copy of your site.
Security Scanning and Malware Removal
Our malware scanners go over the site every day and remove malware if it detects it. Malware is much more common than you realize. One of the ways it gets into your website is through the plugins used to develop the site. This is the leading reason we update plugins. Usually, the updates are released because they have security patches in them.
Contact Form Testing
Forms break all the time, and no one knows until an existing client or customer reaches out to them. That’s why we made it part of our process to test contact forms once per month to make sure you’re getting the submission. If we don’t hear from that person, we reach out to them through email to confirm.
Get in Touch With Us For Managed Website Hosting
If you’re interested in managed website hosting, contact us today. We’d love to talk with you about your site and get you set up on a plan where you can feel confident that your site will function.
