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Web Hosting, Web Hosting UK, Dedicated Servers, Managed Hosting, Dedicated Server | CWCS
Updates to software packages and operating systems are vitally important to ensure that your server remains secure and up-to-date, to help avoid unexpected downtime or a potential risk to your important company data. If there is a known vulnerability in your software or operating system, it won’t take hackers or distributers of malware much time to take advantage of it. This is where an effective strategy for managing your server patch updates becomes essential to ensure you don’t become an easy target.
There are a few things to can consider when planning your patch management strategy:
- Use a test infrastructure to properly test patches before deployment to your live environment. This can be costly but it is always recommended to test a patch before it goes live to minimise any unexpected errors.
- Always ensure that you have a full image backup of your server before applying any patches to your live environment.
- Make sure that any patching occurs at night or at weekends so if anything does happen, it minimises the effect on your business.
- Always have a plan for regression – If possible use a patch management tool which will allow you to roll back any updates if your server software becomes unstable.
All the points above will help your patch management strategy, but it isn’t always physically possible to follow the best practices due to restrictions. For example, purchasing a server purely for testing purposes is practical for large companies, but for small companies that may only have one server, it isn’t always possible, as this can quickly double your costs. Also it isn’t always possible to patch your software in the middle of the night or at weekends, as it means arranging for your IT staff to be in the office out-of-hours, which isn’t always possible.
If this is the case, then the best thing you can do is let your managed hosting company take care of this for you. Our Gold and Platinum Server Management levels will include routine security patching and updates, ensuring that the responsibility for this is taken away from you. We also make sure that your server is in peak physical condition with pro-active server load management, advanced server monitoring, routine security audits and scans and daily incremental/weekly full backups, giving you peace of mind and letting you concentrate on your business.
In the past two decades websites have moved from being “trophies”, showcasing the achievements and USPs of a business, to being central participants in the communications and profit-making activities of a company.
Consequently business websites have become increasingly central to corporate wellbeing. It is regarded essential that mission critical websites, especially those involved in e-commerce, have the highest possible levels of uptime, are speedy and responsive to user requests, and provide a safe, secure browsing experience.
There is, however, a practical solution to these exacting business requirements: “Managed Hosting”. Managed hosting is an arrangement by which a website hosting company will provide you with a service tailored to maintaining and supporting your website. This will include configuring and managing a server dedicated specifically to your website.
Here at CWCS we provide a brilliant managed hosting service. Your server can be installed with your own choice of operating system, Linux or Windows, and whatever flavour of that operating system most suits your web developers, and the site itself. Our package also comes with 24/7 technical support 365 days a year. After all, you need to be able to know that help is only a phone call away. Another highlight of our managed hosting service is our load balancing system.
This means that should one server experience a problem, a backup or failover server immediately kicks in and handles your website traffic, ensuring that your end users will never even notice a problem in the first place.
Speed now plays an important part in your search engine rankings as Google have now factored website loading time into their search engine algorithm. It is now vital that your website is hosted with a professional managed hosting company who can guarantee 100% uptime and unlimited bandwidth for your dedicated server.
According to Google’s Webmaster Blog:
“We’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. Speeding up websites is important – not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed – that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”
We encourage you to start looking at the speed of your site, not only to see how to improve your search engine rankings, but your customers experience on your website. The loading time of your site could now be the difference between hitting that first page of Google and your website being nowhere to be seen.
In order to stay ahead of the competition, it is vital that your hosting company is not letting your website down, so make sure that it is hosted on high speed dedicated servers from CWCS Managed Hosting.
If you are responsible for a high-traffic, commercial website, reliability and continuity of service will both be high priorities.
This kind of reliability is most likely going to be provided by choosing a ‘managed server’ hosting option. With managed hosting a site is hosted on a server dedicated entirely to that website, and is administered and supported by specialist, qualified staff at the web hosting company.
The kinds of support provided are as follows:
- Assisting with the server setup – this can be particularly helpful if you choose a Linux server, as the Linux operating system, with its remarkable power and flexibility, can sometimes overwhelm inexperienced users. Having said that, assistance with Windows server setup could also be invaluable.
- Server monitoring – it helps to have experts on a hand to “read” the self-monitoring messages generated by the server.
- Applying crucial patches and updates in a timely manner.
- Regularly backing up your data and server configuration.
These are just a few of the key admin tasks that would be taken out of your company’s hands, should you choose a managed server option.
Here at CWCS, with a decade’s experience in the web hosting world, we offer a managed server service that is second to none, and which is underpinned by peerless technical support available 24/7 365 days a year, and by phone or email.
Managed hosting is not necessarily the cheapest web hosting option, but it is certainly the most likely to bring you peace of mind.
Everyone should know by now that, here at CWCS Managed Hosting, we’re about top notch customer service and delivering great value for money to our customers. Many of our competitors have been using all kinds of smoke and mirrors to over-complicate their packages for managed hosting and dedicated servers.
So, in order to be completely transparent about what our customers actually get for their money when they buy a dedicated server or a managed server from us, we have re-done those sections of our website to show exactly what’s included or otherwise – all you have to do is to contact us via those particular pages and we’ll get in touch and discuss the options with you; it really couldn’t be simpler.
We won’t try and get you to buy a package that makes a salesperson loads of commission but is completely inappropriate for your requirements, we’ll try and get the package as close to what you’re looking for as we can; whether its different backup regimes or security scanning or patching, we’ll try to do what’s reasonable to work with you, rather than getting you to buy something off a price list.
Its unlikely there’s anyone sane out there who had any doubt whatsoever that, in order for your business to survive, succeed and grow, you have to have an effective online presence. We often see companies who’ve clearly figured that they need a website, so they go and set up a website; they don’t develop it, manage it or invest further in it.
We also see companies who figure they need email, so they set up email but then take three or four days to respond to sales enquiries – meanwhile, we’ve placed the business elsewhere with someone who responded quickly and secured our business as a result.
Modern business moves so much more quickly than it used to, which is why we’re about to come to market with several new managed hosting, hosted email and cloud-based services. We’re running at 100mph to get ahead of the market and to ensure that we can offer all the services that our customers want, with great service and offering tremendous value for money – its doubtful we’ll ever be the cheapest in the market for dedicated servers or managed hosting because lots of our competitors don’t even offer telephone support.
We don’t know about you, but if we’re outsourcing some of our key IT infrastructure to another company, we totally want to be able to call them up if there something wrong or if we want some general guidance. We don’t want to be sending a text and hoping it gets there and that it gets acted on, yet some of our competitors honestly do just that.
As your website changes and develops over time, your web hosting requirements are likely to change in tandem with it.
Let’s take a fictional case study of a family-run business selling eco-cleaning products.
In the early days, a two or three page promotional site, perhaps with contact details, plus some basic product information with a few enticing images, makes a perfectly satisfactory starting point. The starter plan hosting package we offer here at CWCS Managed Hosting would be more than sufficient for this kind of site.
Two years down the line, things might well change considerably for our case study website. It could have developed a lucrative e-commerce section, and the number of unique users per week might have increased from hundreds to thousands. The site now requires potentially unlimited bandwidth and more hard disk space to remain viable and competitive. For such a site a dedicated server soon becomes a very real option.
A dedicated server is a single server entirely set aside for your company’s website or sites. Dedicated servers can be managed by you, or your IT department, but many site owners choose a dedicated server with “managed hosting”. Here, the web hosting company takes all the server administration duties off your hands, including applying updates, as well as checking for smooth running and optimal performance.
Here at CWCS, should you opt for a dedicated server we can provide a high quality managed hosting service, including terrific technical support and an assigned project manager for every client.
Many site owners, once they have found a suitable web hosting company and launched their website, could be forgiven for thinking “job done”.
But the site launch is really only the beginning of a continuing process of development. This is especially the case if your site represents a business, and if you are involved in e-commerce.
One post-launch objective will be to find ways of gauging your site’s success. ‘Success’ means different things to different people. The owner of a website for a 10-member stamp collecting club might be thrilled with 10 unique visitors a month. The same figure might spell disaster for an online retailer.
Given the difficulty of defining “success” here are some suggestions for objective success metrics.
A well promoted, moderate sized business should aim for around 100 unique visitors per day. Large businesses could get around 1,000 unique visits per day. On the other hand a global company with a substantial marketing budget might expect around 100,000 daily unique visits.
If your site has an e-commerce section, another success gauge is your “conversion” rate: the percentage of visits to a site which turn into completed transactions. A realistic conversion rate to aim for, for medium sized businesses, is around 2%.
Here at CWCS managed hosting, we will do our very best to suggest objectively the best web site hosting package for your site. For instance, should the site exceed your success indicators, generating large volumes of traffic, we might recommend the dedicated server option.
When you are running a website, statistics can actually be helpful, so long as you know how to get the best out of them.
Your web site hosting company should provide you with statistics reports for your site via the Control Panel, the software available in a browser to help you configure your site.
The first statistic to look out for is “page impressions” or “page hits”. This is the number of times that pages on your site have been viewed by any user over a given period, and is a simple gauge of user activity.
However, a high number of page impressions could be misleading as you don’t know whether this is made up of a few users browsing the site many times, or many users browsing the site less frequently, or a combination of those activities.
To get a complete view of the site’s performance, also look at the Unique User count: i.e. the number of individual site visitors over a given period. Indeed, in late 2006 “unique users” overtook “page impressions” as the preferred compulsory metric for one influential website auditing company.
Here at CWCS Managed Hosting, as a web hosting company that’s been in business for over a decade, and with stellar 24/7 technical support by phone or email, we are always happy to give guidance on getting the best out of your website statistics.
A dedicated server is a single server devoted entirely to hosting your website.
Renting server space from a hosting company is akin to renting property. You can either go for the one-bedroom flat in a sizeable block or the five-bedroom house, with a beautiful garden all to yourself.
The one-bed flat is the shared website hosting option: your website occupies space on a server shared by numerous other users. The five-bedroom house is the dedicated server: you have the place to yourself; there’s more space, and room for many more visitors at a time.
For many companies, the shared hosting option will be absolutely fine. It’s typically a reasonably priced setup which matches their cost, size, traffic and bandwidth requirements perfectly.
However, for some companies, their websites may have expanded in size, complexity and traffic demands to such an extent that they have to go for that sumptuous five-bedroom house, especially if their website is now “mission critical”.
However, you should budget for a cost increase if you are moving from shared to dedicated website hosting. The monthly rental for a dedicated server can be significantly more than the cost of the shared option.
The decision on shared hosting should not be taken lightly, but can yield peace of mind and eventually “Return on Investment”.
Here at CWCS we offer a range of unbeatable managed hosting packages for your dedicated server, with benefits such as a brand new server, unlimited bandwidth, 24/7 expert technical support and an assigned project manager.
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