WordPress hosting and maintenance

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Here at the DMA we host a lot of WordPress websites.

We have extensive experience in the world of web hosting and after searching for the best solution for our needs we settled a number of years ago on the Rackspace Cloud.

Rackspace is the market leader in scaleable website hosting platforms (servicing more than half the Fortune 100 companies and over 100,000 customers).

Using our Rackspace solution:

  • Your site is hosted in a cloud environment, where it is automatically mirrored and always available – because there is no physical server to fail, your site will always be up (of course, there are still some scheduled maintenance periods, but these will rarely effect your site)
  • Your site is immediately allocated more bandwidth if your traffic spikes
  • Your site hosted in a fast and secure environment
  • Your site is in a “blue-ribbon” neighbourhood, making the most of your SEO

Backups

We all know backups are critical and like insurance – you never question them it until disaster strikes and you need it! While Rackspace keeps hourly snapshots of your site, it is important to have regular backups to a second discrete server environment.

It is also important to backup your complete site, including all database components, posts, pages, comments, plugins, themes, etc – the whole box and dice!

We have thoroughly tested our back-up solution, and know that we can restore your site from the back-up should something happen.

All of our hosting plans include automatic, regular back-ups of your complete WordPress installation.

Maintenance

At last count, WordPress was used by 54% of sites with a content management system, which is also 14% of all sites on the internet.  This makes WordPress the most popular website platform in the world.  Your site benefits from the combined development resources of this large user and developer base and the continued, free, growth of WordPress as an open source platform.

It is very important for your site’s security and stability that the patches and upgrades of WordPress are applied as they come out.  This keeps your site as safe as possible from hackers.  This also applies to Plugins and the functional extensions to your site.

The DMA offers a regular maintenance program for customers who are using our hosting and backup services.  For our hosting customers, this involves regularly applying patches and security updates are released for WordPress.

Because we follow best practice and backup all sites before any upgrades or patches applied, we cannot provide maintenance services to sites which are hosting in third party environments.