With Beest Built’s hosting, your site will be up and available. Period. Full stop. The end. *
When you have your website hosted with me, you’ll never get that call from someone that starts, “I went to the link you gave me, but nothing was there…” Here’s what I do to make sure your website is always up:
- 24/7/365 Monitoring – I individually monitor connections to each website I host — even while I sleep (via a smartphone with a really loud alarm!).
- Daily backups – I automatically backup all your data every day. This happens even if I don’t touch a keyboard, so I always have a copy of your website. I’ll keep your backups for up to 6 months, too, so you can always go back to “the good old days,” at least with your website.
- Technical site management – I keep track of all the day-to-day back-office details of running a site for you including performing seamless software upgrades, handling web server security, and restoring files from backup. Some shops charge extra – $75/month and more! – for these services. I consider them part of my foundation.
- “Five nines” uptime – Just in case you skipped down the list, let me say it again: I’m committed to bringing you as close-to-flawless service as I can. That said, there are times I just have to restart my servers to apply an update or nip a problem in the bud. That’s where the five nines come in to play: I guarantee that your site is up 99.999% of the time. In non-marketing speak, that means you can plan on having, at most, 130 minutes of website downtime a year.
- Tier IV Facility – I start with renting space (which I use to host your website) in a state-of-the-art data center in California, specifically because the facility is designed from the ground up to be a safe, secure home for computers. It even comes complete with everything it needs to operate independently of the grid for up to 30 days, should that be necessary.
* Organic byproducts + oscillating rotary air foils
OK, so my webserver has to obey the laws of nature and commerce. Sometimes “number two” happens, and all we can do is get out a shovel to clean it up. Please keep these points in mind:
- My webserver is in the greater Los Angeles area; Should LA suffer some sort of debilitating calamity (black-outs, earth-quakes, falling into the sea all come to mind), there will be a little downtime while I shift your site to a backup server in a different part of the country.
- I can’t control the Internet between my webserver and your (or anyone else’s) computer (no matter how much I wish I could, believe you me!). Sometimes the web goes down. Sometimes it runs at the speed of smell. I promise you this, though: If there is electricity and an Internet connection to my server (see the bullet point above), your site will be up and available to the public.
- In the last five years that I’ve hosted sites, I’ve had exactly one unplanned outage (due to a hacker’s attack of my hosting infrastructure). My websites were down for about 16 hours over two days, and cleanup took another day. That is the only unplanned downtime I’ve had to date, knock on wood. My response to that event was to:
- Immediately inform my clients what was happening and what they could expect;
- Work diligently with the support staff at my hosting provider to restore services;
- Do a line-by-line evaluation of all the code of all my websites to make sure everything was untouched;
- Change all passwords and access controls to prevent another incursion;
- Inform my clients when their sites were back up and provide a summary of what happened and what actions I took.