Your might be interested in using our Care Hosting services to manage and maintain your website and wonder why we want to migrate your site to our servers.
Well lets have look at this:
Lets start with our monitoring system, we monitor all websites on our Care Hosting and run automatic checks every few minutes to ensure sites are up and running. If there are any problems, we are notified instantly and the website is tested to ensure everything is working.
If there is a problem it is investigated immediately and our priority is always to get the website back up and running as soon as possible.
3rd Party Hosting > monitoring If your website is hosted on a 3rd party host and and our monitoring system flags the site as not loading as expected, it still needs investigating. Their tech team might be working on an issues but of course we do not know this . We have seen issues of this nature go on for days and we would be forced to temporarily disable our monitoring service on your site.This is not ideal and compromises our service. If your site is actually down, our only course of action is to contact you and advise of the outage.
We run our own remote backup system, meaning copies of your site, email and database are regularly collected from our servers and stored on a server in a different geo location. We also do additional database backups for sites with transactional databases.
3rd Party Hosting > backups Our backup system runs at a server level, we have designed and developed it to work with our systems, it is not compatible with shared hosting, each hosting company handles backups differently and many companies pass this onus on to their clients. The only way we could ensure we have good backups of your site would be to manually take them and even then trying to restore a backup can be problematic - If we experience a problem restoring a backup, it is very likely we would not have the access to fix the issue - as we are not the account holder, your hosting might not even allow us to open a support ticket and we would need to get you to do this..
Something we would fix on our servers in minutes could take days.. on a 3rd part shared hosting account.
Server updates and support, this is another real concern and sometimes security or software updates break websites. I am not talking about website updates here but the actual web server. We take a snapshot of our server before updating, so that if there are any problems with websites on that server we are able to revert and investigate - without serious disruption to any sites on that server. We often run updates on test servers first.
3rd Party Hosting > server updates, big hosting companies update their servers and if this breaks your website it is your responsibility to fix it, sometimes they drop support for scripts that your site might rely on and that is it - your site goes down and you need to act - this could be a 1 hour fix or a new website!
Let me sum this up by saying that actually the most important factor here is responsibility, we are responsible for keeping all the sites on our servers up and running, there is no back and forwards, no waiting for 3rd party intervention .
