What is a managed web solution really all about?

We are often asked what the difference is between a managed website solution, like ish onCourse, and buying an off the shelf website hosting plan from the ISP of your choice or hosting a web site from your own office or data centre.

In a nutshell, not only have we written custom software to seamlessly manage the onCourse replication process between your local onCourse database and onCourse website, but we are also providing you with much more than just a space to hold your data.

As your business grows and you begin having thousands of visitors to your site each day, you can be assured that the onCourse solution will gracefully handle the load without impacting on your speed of service.

We have several monitoring systems to alert us of a range of issues with any of our hosted services, such as onCourse websites. We monitor our servers, firewalls, load balancers and switch for load, bandwidth and CPU usage. All mission critical services are hosted with in an enterprise grade co-location centre. Physical access to the facility is available via biometric and photo id. Power, temperature and internet are all 2N +1 redundant.

Our infrastructure has been built to make each item of hardware redundant, for example if a firewall physically fails, the traffic will automatically be redirected to our second firewall. This failover is instantaneous and invisible to end users as the firewalls will switch within one second.

By monitoring CPU load and active sessions to our servers, we are alerted to malicious activity, like DoS attacks, which can slow down genuine customer access to a crawl. We would then respond to such activity by selectively blocking IP addresses. Stateful firewalls protect the network and regular vulnerability scans ensure PCI compliance. At peak load our servers rarely exceed 15% CPU usage and our clustered website applications allow us to insert new servers at any time. For maintenance, we can take a server out of the production environment without any downtime for our users.

Speed and load performance is monitored for every customer website and we will get an email sent to our technical staff if your html page load speed ever goes over 5 seconds. We check load speeds for every hosted website with an automated system every 15 minutes.

As part of our hosting services, we offer our professional and enterprise grade customers a hosted test website that they can access at any time to test design changes and new onCourse web functions prior to sending them into live production. We use a snapshot of the previous day’s data to make this test experience as ‘real life’ as possible to your current web data conditions.

We do not need to take your site down even for upgrades of the software, but should some unforeseen event occur that causes problems with your website we will email your nominated contacts and keep you up to date during the resolution process.

We hope you find this information useful in understanding the hosted web solution ish has provided your organisation.