We host using the industry leading cloud server service, Amazon Web Servers (AWS), for their reliability and premium uptime. Depending on your plan level and website needs, Online Growth Systems offers both Shared and Dedicated hosting.

Hosting services are included in our standard plan levels, so there is no additional monthly fee by hosting with Online Growth Systems. There is also no discount for hosting outside of AWS servers, because it requires more involvement from our SysAdmin when deploying to external servers.

Our Uptime Guarantees are in alignment with AWS Service Level Agreements. Uptime Guarantee percentages are based on quarterly averages. A site is considered “down” if it fails our monitoring system health check. We monitor all sites covered by an Online Growth Systems Managed Service Plan, even when hosted outside of our servers. However, our SLA only applies to sites hosted by Online Growth Systems.

Though there may be limitations to how Online Growth Systems can help with site outages on external servers, we will work with the third-party hosting providers and offer assistance where possible to get a site back up.

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is a protocol for sending information securely over the internet. When your site has a valid SSL Certificate, you’ll see a closed “lock” icon next to the browser URL bar.

Online Growth Systems monitors SSL Certificate Validation for all OGS Managed Service sites. When hosted with us, we’ll also set up automatic renewal of SSL Certificates, or work with your team on custom SSL Renewals when a certificate needs to be provided to us. When hosting outside of Online Growth Systems, we’ll let your team know when your SSL Certificate Validation is about to expire so you can work with your hosting provider to ensure it’s renewal.

We also monitor for “Mixed Content Warnings” which means your SSL Certificate is current, but you have individual assets on your site that are not secure. These are usually assets, such as images, links, or files that are from an insecure source. We can work with you to resolve those types of Mixed Content.

Performing routine backups of your site files and database are especially important in emergency situations where you need to revert to a prior version of your website, or need to quarantine your current site (due to potential malicious activity) and want to spin up an older/clean version of your site so visitors don’t experience a site outage.

For sites hosted with Online Growth Systems, automated backups are performed daily or weekly depending on the plan level. Backups are saved for 30 days.

Content Management Systems are the platform your website is built on. This platform is created by a community of developers who continually work to improve the security, functionality, and features of the platform. As a result, there are routine updates pushed out by the platform to all sites that use the platform. Any update release will include new code that gets added to your website in order to include these new features and security packages.

As great as this is, the updates have potential to cause issues on your site. Any time new code is added to existing code, there is a possibility of conflict. For this reason, Online Growth Systems Managed Services always performs updates on a staging environment and conducts a thorough QA to ensure the new code causes no issues, before deploying the update to your live site. If an issue does occur, we’ll attempt to manually fix it within your Updates Plan hours, or we’ll reach out with a recommendation and estimate. Sometimes our recommended course of action is to simply “wait” until the next update is released (like choosing not to install a computer Operating System update “until all the bugs are found.”).

Content Management System platforms don’t come “out of the box” with all the features you want, so your website is likely built with plugins as well. Plugins are built by other developers, and similar to your platform core, plugins release security and feature enhancement updates on a routine schedule.

The more plugins you have, the more external influence there is on your site’s performance. Keeping these plugins up to date with the latest releases will keep your site functioning properly. However, each release includes new code that could conflict with your existing code.

For this reason, Online Growth Systems Managed Services always performs updates on a staging environment and conducts a thorough QA to ensure the new code causes no issues, before deploying the update to your live site. If an issue does occur, we’ll attempt to manually fix it within your Updates Plan hours, or we’ll reach out with a recommendation and estimate. Sometimes our recommended course of action is to simply “wait” until the next update is released (like choosing not to install a computer Operating System update “until all the bugs are found.”).

Malware is any type of malicious code or program inserted into a site through security vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities occur on your site when technology is outdated, such as the CMS Core and Plugins, so keeping those up to date is a huge step in your site security. However, there are other types of technology that can also become outdated over time, such as the site’s coding language (example: PHP, JavaScript) or language library (example: jQuery, Angular, Node, React). Any server or database can have technology that becomes outdated over time.

Online Growth Systems Managed Services monthly updates process also includes malware scans to identify potential risks. If a medium or high risk is identified, we’ll create a recommendation ticket with an estimate, and talk through a mitigation plan with you.

After CMS Core and Plugin updates have been performed on a staging environment, we do a QA (Quality Assurance) Review of your site to make sure there are no issues. We’ll then deploy the updates to your live site, and do another QA of your live site files. While the primary focus is to look for issues relating to the updates, we always have an eye out for user experience improvements we can recommend.

Note that QA Review is not a full audit of your site, however audits are a service we offer upon request. Technology best practice standards are ever changing because technology itself is ever changing. Your site is also ever changing with each Core/Plugin update, addition of content, and requested enhancement. Using your plan’s Client Maintenance Request (CMR) hours, we can scan for ADA Compliance, SEO Best Practices, Site Speed/Performance Best Practices, Security Best Practices, and other types of audits.

Client Maintenance Request (CMR) hours is a monthly retainer of hours that gets you direct support from Online Growth Systems Managed Services staff, plus consultation with our UI/UX and Solutions Architect teams. These hours are commonly used for the following types of requests:

• CMS tutorial videos and staff onboarding
• Remediation of bug fixes
• Frontend and backend enhancements
• Consultation, brainstorming, estimating, and check-in calls
• On-Call/Emergency Response
• Collaboration with your other vendors (like an SEO Partner)
• Site Audits

Once the retainer hours have been used for the month, we can either pause until the next month retainer hours become available, or continue progress with Time & Material Overages approval.