Hosting, Administration & Support Overview

OM4 provides managed WordPress hosting for business websites. This means we not only host your website, we install WordPress upgrades as well as WordPress plugin upgrades for you, and provide access to a super useful Support Desk designed for non-technical folk.

Plans: Hosting, Administration & Support Pricing and Signup

Component	What OM4 Does
Hosting	OM4 hosts your website on fast, business grade servers in Australia, the US or Europe, and has full time personnel who look after technical aspects of your hosting. You manage all aspects of your website from your WordPress Dashboard. The speed, reliability and security of a business website depends on many factors. With your own hosting service, you typically have to manage technical hosting issues, and this can involve complex configuration tools such as ftp, cpanel and suchlike.
Administration	OM4 analyses, tests and applies WordPress and WordPress plugin updates for you. If you use a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, you need to keep it up to date with the latest releases and patches – otherwise your site may be vulnerable to well publicised bugs. If you run your own hosting, you’ll need to take care of this yourself, or arrange someone else to do so. Some updates are easy, others aren’t. If an update breaks your site, it can be hard to figure out what has gone wrong.
Business Support	OM4 provides business-oriented support for running a website. This means help in how to update your website and use it to market your business. If you arrange your own hosting, your hosting provider will likely provide technical support for their hosting service, but not in how to use the website itself or marketing concepts. Public forums can be a great source of information, but can require a lot of time to get real answers to your questions.

There is no contract period for hosting with OM4. We host the sites we develop for as long as you want us to. If you ever want to move to another hosting provider, for a small fee (3 hours at our current rate) we will prepare an up to date version of your website with a custom WordPress theme to incorporate your current design settings together with your current content, ready for installation on another WordPress host.

The Hosting, Administration & Support service is designed to take care of the technical aspects of running your business online, leaving you to focus on the real work of running your business online.

A breakdown of inclusions is shown below.

Hosting

Your website is hosted on a fast 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.

WordPress does have a tool to allow you to apply updates to your own WordPress installation. This is helpful in many situations, however issues are known to occur with upgrades that can be hard to resolve if you don’t have a technical background.

With OM4, an experienced WordPress expert reviews and tests updates and patches before applying them, and is on hand to resolve any unanticipated issues to do arise.

Security. OM4 monitors security developments and takes measures 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 advised to keep your own backups of important data to reduce the risk of data loss.

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, the US and Europe). In the event of a major outage event with a data centre, we have a plan to restore your website to one of our alternate servers – we operate distributed name servers to speed up this process.

Support and Education

OM4 operates a business-oriented Support Desk and encourages customers to use it. We provide free support to help you understand how to use your website and assist in resolving faults that may occur.

If you need extra work done on your site (such as adding a new web page for a new product launch), we are available to work for a fixed price to get things done.

And if you want some one-on-one training to help you master a particular skill, we can schedule a paid online training session for you.

If there is a fault in your OM4 website or the software it runs on, we fix it free of charge.

Changes

A list of changes that have been made to the platform can be found at http://om4.com.au/changes/.