Are you up 24/7?
Do you make any guarantees for up-time?
What would happen to my website if you upgrade or switch hosting solutions?
Where are your servers located?
Do you have a data recovery plan?
What website security do you provide and what do you have in place to prevent hacking?
What sort of access will I have to your servers for setup and configuration?
Additional questions?
Are you up 24/7?
Yes. Our hosting is 24/7. We are up all day, every day, all year around.
Do you make any guarantees for up-time?
Our up-time is 99.99%, per Pingdom monthly statistics. We guarantee at least 99.9% and are always striving to provide the highest possible up-time to ensure the best possible customer experience. Guaranteed up-time excludes the following circumstances:
Also the virtual hosting environment allows for resource upgrades, such as disk space capacity and CPU power with zero down-time.
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What would happen to my website if you upgrade or switch hosting solutions?
If we were to perform a migration to a different server or data center, we would ensure no down-time during the migration because a copy of the entire site would be established on the new server prior to re-directing traffic.
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Where are your servers located?
Our hosting servers are located in a data center in College Station, TX.
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Do you have a data recovery plan?
Definitely! We have several ways of preserving your data. cPanel, the hosting control panel provides automated weekly and monthly back-ups. Also the server environment is equipped with RAID 10 data redundancy, and we have a local tower, as well as an additional local data RAID, both of which store individual local backup copies. This is particularly used for our website design clients, but we are willing to provide these off-site backups to others for an additional fee, as well. One of the add-ons we install with every Joomla! website we create is a backup utility that backs up and compresses the website and its database from the server-side; these backups can be downloaded via FTP for restoration and duplication purposes. We will also be happy to look into similar utilities for other Content Management Systems (CMS’s) upon request.
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What website security do you provide and what do you have in place to prevent hacking?
We provide multiple layers of hosting security because hacking is unfortunately a distinct possibility in today’s world. While many sites have never been hacked, it can happen, and we genuinely appreciate the strong need for multiple layers of security.
In addition to the hosting method, the web server and the website design methods provide added security: On a basic level, chmod limits are set for read/write/execute access for owner, group, and public categories. SSL certificates can, of course, be set up to create secure connections, a feature which is especially significant for e-commerce sites that do not use Paypal in their transactions, since clients' financial information is then submitted directly via the website in question. Mod_security rules are put in place to enable filtering and post-scanning functionality, but these rules can also be customized in a dynamic way to enable or disable mod_security, per request. The virtual hosting solution is fully managed by system administrators and a support team, so should any problem extend beyond Tier 1 support’s scope of knowledge, it can also be referred to our escalated support group to ensure the highest level of support, as well as the most optimized and specific customized security measures.
Finally, a further layer of security is available at the website design level: in our case, this usually means security for Joomla!. We disable the initial administrative user after installation to prevent hacking attempts via the default username of “admin” or the default database table ID 42. The system we use also allows us to monitor suspicious activity and block specific IP addresses. Security features, such as those mentioned above, as well as others are easily managed with the help of add-ons specifically designed to heighten security. Some of the add-ons are free, though the most comprehensive ones come at a reasonable cost of approximately 30-65 dollars.
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What sort of access will I have to your servers for setup and configuration?
The primary virtual server, a CentOS v6 Linux server, provides you with cPanel accounts for easy access to, as well as creation and configuration of MySQL databases, FTP accounts, e-mail accounts, etc. These accounts can be permitted to provide root access, although due to security concerns this is not typically included in what we provide our clients. Should clients require their own virtual private server (VPS), a dedicated server, or a Windows-based server, this can also be arranged for an appropriate price.
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