Hosting, Administration and Support
When you choose an OM4 website you gain access to our hosting, administration and support services.
These services are designed to take care of the technical aspects of running your business online and leave you to focus on the real work of running your business.
Our hosting, support and administration fee are summarised as follows:
- OM4 Community Website: $35/mth AUD
- OM4 Standalone (Premium) Website: $55/mth AUD
A breakdown of inclusions is shown below.
Hosting
Your website is hosted on a quality Linux server that runs in a professionally managed datacentre. You can choose to have your website hosted in the US or Australia. You do not need to login to your server, use FTP or Cpanel or manage the technical aspects of your hosting.
Administration
Once your website is setup and installed, an OM4 administrator carries out important ongoing tasks.
Patches and Upgrades. OM4 arranges to install and test patches issued by the software vendors used to run your website. This includes Linux (Centos), Apache, MySQL, PHP and Wordpress as well as Wordpress plugins. Security patches are applied with priority. OM4 assesses and schedules upgrades to deploy new functionality for your website.
Security. OM4 hardens its servers using automated hardening scripts to reduce the risk of security breaches.
Performance. OM4 monitors server performance and carries out performance tuning tasks.
Availability. OM4 monitors the availability of websites and takes corrective action to restore service if a website is unavailable.
Backup. OM4 arranges to backup your website every night. Daily backups are held for the last 7 days, weekly backups for the last 4 weeks and monthly backups for a minimum of the last 6 months.
Even with these measures in place, you are strongly advised to keep your own backups of important data to reduce the risk of data loss. Under our Terms of Service, OM4 makes no guarantees about the reliability of its backup service.
Offsite Backup. OM4 arranges to backup your website to a location physically separate from the server that runs your website.
Data Recovery. If a fault occurs in your website, we have a plan in place to recover it. If you accidentally delete some of your data and would like us to restore a backup, we can do this for you as a paid support task.
We also have plans in place in the event of a major problem, for example if one of the data centres we use was to have a major outage. We operate servers in different countries (Australia and the US). In the event of a major outage event with a data centre, we have a plan to restore your website to servers operating in the other country. We operate distributed name servers to speed up this process.
Support and Education
If there is a fault in your OM4 website or the software it runs on, we fix it free of charge.
You have access to education resources that tell you the main functions of your website and how to use them. You can ask questions about how to use your website on our private OM4 Forums - responses to forum questions are not charged for.
We have additional options you can call on for support:
- You can hire OM4 by the hour to carry out specific tasks for you
- You can hire OM4 to setup a marketing campaign for you
Add On Options for Standalone Sites
OM4 administers the following components in conjunction with OM4 Standalone websites for an additional monthly fee:
- vBulletin and VBSEO $20/mth
- Moodle $20/mth
- aMember $20/mth
- PostAffiliatePro $20/mth
Where licence fees are involved, you (the client) are responsible for purchasing the licence and upgrades, and retain the licence if you move to another platform.
