One question that we respond to frequently is: “How will my website be hosted?”
Unlike many of our competitors, we provide hosting for most of the websites that we build. Doing so allows us to provide a higher quality of service. We are able to proactively monitor the sites we build, we can respond to support requests faster, and we can make updates with more efficiency when we have direct access to the hosting environment. We are also able to provide a more cost-effective hosting service by pooling resources and distributing those costs across our client base.
Some clients have a specific risk profile and insist on their own, dedicated hosting environment. Of course, we can, and do accommodate this scenario also. This approach is more expensive, but may make more sense for clients who host multiple sites and services. Dedicated hosting also provides isolation and may be something a risk management officer is looking for.
Regardless of the hosting architecture, there are several tools and techniques we use to keep our clients’ web properties running reliably.
Hosting Providers
Using a trustworthy, competent hosting provider is the first step – this can make all the difference. Maintaining a website or digital service can be complicated. You want to know that the infrastructure itself is dependable. The datacenters we work with regularly at Flywheel are:
Multiple Servers
Running your entire website or application on one web server means that you have a single point of failure. In our hosting environment we have multiple servers that all work together. This includes front end web servers as well as back end application and database servers.
Backups
“Disaster recovery” is important to plan for. Being able to recover from an unlikely service interruption, or even an accidental change is important. To do that we implement a robust backup system that allows us to get our systems recovered and running quickly if need be.
Software Updates
Good software vendors are constantly staying on top of the performance and security of their products. The systems that we use are no exception. Keeping software up to date is a big step toward avoiding any compromises or reliability issues.
Uptime Robot
At Flywheel we use a service called Uptime Robot to keep an eye on the availability of the sites we are responsible for. This allows us to watch for any server issues, and we also receive alerts if individual websites are having problems.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is one of the most useful tools we use at Flywheel. Firewall rules help reject unwanted traffic, but Cloudflare can stop a lot of malicious traffic before it even reaches a server. Additional features provide a low-effort CDN with caching and compression capabilities to improve the speed and user experience of any website.
Solution Specific
At Flywheel we do have a standard hosting configuration that works most of the time. But for each client we’ll make sure to size things appropriately and use the right tools for each circumstance.
Interested in web hosting services or solutions? Contact us.
Author: Marc Baron
Technology Lead