OM4 Hosting
Your OM4 website shares the same infrastructure we use to run our own business websites.
Our Terms of Service cover all the details of the hosting relationship. But a few quick tips here.
Types of Hosting
- Community Hosting : These are based on Wordpress MU. They are full Wordpress websites, and you can use any reasonable number of web pages and posts to operate your business. For the same reasons as Wordpress.com, we don’t allow Javascript
- Advanced Hosting: If you have special requirements you can use our Advanced Hosting, which means you have a standalone Wordpress site. Special requirements might include using special plugins not supported on our OM4 Community sites, a need for an integrated Forum or Directory, needing a Membership site (such as aMember), or wanting to be able to use Javascript etc with gay abandon.
Domains and Nameservers
We encourage you to purchase your own domain name for your website and point to our nameservers. You can use your own domain for all our services. Currently this is free, although we may introduce a service fee at some point.
You can use a community subdomain to setup a site (e.g. mysite.om4business.com). You can either continue to run as a subdomain, or map it to your domain when you are ready.
To update your nameservers, logon to your domain registrar and set the nameservers to the values shown below.
- ns1.om4hub.com
- ns2.om4hub.com
You can setup email forwarding for a reasonable number of email addresses at your domains to operate your business.
We don’t host mail boxes, as you can get excellent free mailboxes from Google Mail and Yahoo Mail. So if you don’t have one, set up your mail boxes with them, and forward your OM4 email to those mail boxes.
Both of these mail providers allow you heaps of storage, to send and receive mail with large attachments, and have great junk mail filtering.
Monitoring
We monitor our servers every 15 minutes - if a server goes down, we get alerted to that.
If you would like to monitor the uptime of your own website, you can setup a free hourly uptime check using the service at Pingability. You can check more frequently than hourly, but Pingability charge a fee for that.
Backup
We backup websites every night.
If your website is important to your business, we recommend you should also backup your website yourself. It isn’t hard to do.
Use Dashboard, Manage, Backup to create a backup of your web pages, posts and comments and email them to yourself on a regular basis.
Migrating to another hosting provider
You can migrate your data from OM4 to another hosting provider at any time.
From your Dashboard, use Manage, Export to create an XML export of your website pages, posts, comments and categories. You can import this into another Wordpress site at another host.
The Export will not include your Uploads (images or PDF files you have copied up to your server). We suggest that before you upload files to your website,copy them in a directory on your computer. Then you have all your uploads stored locally as well as on your OM4 site. To migrate to a new server, FTP your uploads to your new host and place them in the correct directory.
The OM4 Theme cannot be copied and taken to your new site. You can choose a theme for your new Wordpress site from the thousands of free Wordpress themes available Wordpress. You can also find a Wordpress developer to prepare a custom Wordpress theme to match your exact business requirements.
FTP and all that
You don’t need FTP access to your OM4 website (and we don’t allow it). Uploading images, PDFs, videos etc is easily achieved when you are editing your posts and pages.