The Little Things Matter In Managed Hosting: Why Digital Marketers Need A Managed Hosting Partner That Works As Your Extended IT Team

Transcription

1 The Little Things Matter In Managed Hosting: Why Digital Marketers Need A Managed Hosting Partner That Works As Your Extended IT Team

2 Not all Managed Hosting Providers are equal As a digital marketing professional, you know just how much of a difference even the smallest details can make. While the slogans and services for every Managed Hosting Provider you see may sound the same, all hosting solutions are not. The right managed services hosting provider can give your campaign a competitive edge, and your team peace of mind. But how can you tell the difference? 3

3 In this ebook, we aim to remove some of the mystery from selecting your Managed Hosting provider and help you understand what you should expect from the company you choose to host your digital marketing campaign. We ll break down the various factors you should consider into these three key categories: Service 1 Service Service Support Support 2 Commitment Support Commitment Commitment 3 SERVICE SUPPORT COMMITMENT In 2014, studies by Syntax.com suggested that 72% of businesses had adopted some form of Cloud service......and yet recent survey results suggest that as many as 57% of businesses can t give a specific reason for choosing their web hosting provider! You don t have to be a Cloud specialist to leverage the technology to its full potential - the right partner can make all the difference. Find a team that will work as an extension of your own; that will be just as committed to your success as you are. 4

4 Service Support Commitment 1 Service - Why Do You Need Managed Hosting Services? A study by Synatx in 2014 showed that choosing a managed services hosting provider saved the average team 40% on IT consultations, and valuable time liaising with technical support professionals. That money can make a huge difference to your next campaign - but how do you choose the service that s right for you? The goal of your campaign is to get your message out to your target market. The service aspect of that is the nuts and bolts of your hosting - getting the storage and bandwidth you need, and ensuring your data is securely protected from attacks and readily available to your end users. 4

5 Service Support Commitment SERVICE You Need Solutions That Fit Just like no hosting provider is exactly the same, no digital marketing campaign is either. While switching to managed hosting services can save your team the expense of maintaining your own hardware and employing an in-house IT team, many hosting packages can include niche services that your company will never take advantage of. Choose a provider that offers you customizable solutions, so you never pay for services or storage you don t need. The right provider will work with your team to determine your performance, compliance and security requirements and design a Cloud service package that provides you with exactly what you need. You shouldn t have to spend your days wading through complex technical documents to provide your end users with the best possible experience. Services That Make A Difference HIPAA / PCI Compliance Management Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Business Associates Agreement (BAA) management Customer Assist for Compliance Policies and Procedures management 5

6 Service Support Commitment SERVICE You Need Scalability The ability of your managed services hosting provider to scale your service will make all the difference when planning for your campaign. Whether you re a freshman marketing team launching your first digital campaign or a seasoned professional pulling in millions of clicks, you need to be confident the provider you choose can provide the bandwidth you need to deliver an engaging, responsive site to your users. You shouldn t need to over purchase services and bandwidth to be prepared for a runaway success. Find a provider that can increase or decrease your service as needed, to suit your individual campaign needs. 6

7 Service Support Commitment SERVICE You Need To Keep Your Data Safe A survey by SiliconAngle suggests that only 56% of businesses using the Cloud trust their provider to protect their data and applications. The best support team in the world won t mean a thing if your site is compromised, inaccessible or unresponsive to your users. Hackers are unleashing a growing number of weapons against business, government and personal websites, and the cybersecurity breaches are a regular occurrence in the US, with experts reporting multiple detected attacks each day. Your campaign should have regular monitoring for breaches and the latest security standards and software in place. Choose a provider that provides automatic failover measures to guarantee reliable service and constant availability of all your applications. Services That Make A Difference Server Anti-Virus maintenance Firewall Maintenance Data Encryption Secure FTP Server Maintenance and Management Implement and Manage Emergency Operation Mode Web Application Firewall and CDN Management and Maintenance 7

8 Service Support Commitment SERVICE Services That Make A Difference Proactive 24/7/365 management, monitoring and auditing of the Hardware, Operating System, Backups, Replications, SQL Server backups, restores and database & website clones Availability & Response Time by Location Location Availability (%) Response Time (ms) Down Duration Downtimes Last Downtime Dallas - US 100 6, Virginia - US 100 8, New York - US 100 5, Uptime Report Performance Report - Outage Report - Regular reporting from your hosting services provider can keep you update on any outages or breaches that occur to your system. You'll sleep easier knowing someone is always watching your site. 8

9 Service Support Commitment SERVICE You Need To Be Prepared While the services and systems our Managed Hosting Provider offers may look great on paper, it s vital that every aspect of your network and application be tested in advance to ensure that all systems will respond well when your campaign launches. It s particularly important to look for a managed services hosting provider who will offer you application testing. This ensures that not only will the network your site is hosted on be prepared to handle heavy loads of campaign traffic, but that all aspects of your site itself will as well. Application testing can uncover errors and inefficiencies before they cost your site valuable clicks. Services That Make A Difference Load testing will ensure your site performs well under both normal and anticipated peak conditions, so a hot campaign isn t stopped dead in its tracks when users overload your site. Stress testing will provide insight into how your network and applications will behave if overloaded, and identify potential problems that can be corrected before you go live. 47 % of people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less. 40 % will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load. Is your hosting provider losing you valuable clicks? 9

10 ice Support Commitment 2 Support - How Do You Find a Team You Can Count On? One of the key advantages of working in a team is letting every individual member work to their strengths, so no single person has to struggle with a workload that s too much or a concept they don t understand. No detail is so small as to not matter in your digital marketing campaign. Find a managed services hosting provider that will provide you with the details you need, when you need them. That doesn t mean a company that will flood you with technical data, but rather a hosting company that understands your team s needs, and works in partnership with you to meet them. With the right Cloud provider, you won t need to know every minute detail that goes into making your site work - you ll just be confident that it will. 10

11 SUPPORT You Need Immediate Solutions An in-house IT staff often has their own agendas and processes that you re required to navigate when making use of their services. When you team up with a hosting provider that positions experts to work directly with your marketing professionals, you can skip submitting a ticket to IT and waiting for an automated response. Services That Make A Difference Offsite Replication of Production Servers to alternate Data Center for Full Business Continuity 11

12 SUPPORT You Need Feedback You know marketing, which means you also know how important it is to get feedback from your audience to measure how effectively your campaign is reaching your target. Managed services hosting providers are uniquely positioned to provide you with valuable data on who is interacting with your site and how it s performing for them. Regular reports on site response times in target locations and detailed data on exactly which parts of your site are engaging your audience can help you more effectively focus your campaign and convey your message. Technical data can appear complex and meaningless to the untrained eye, but a hosting provider that can convert that data to relevant statistics your team can take action on is an asset to your organization. Services That Make A Difference Security event monitoring (real-time monitoring of failed logon attempts. 12

13 SUPPORT Can your Managed Hosting Provider tell you: Who is visiting your site? How long each page takes to load? What type of content is most frequently loaded? How your site performs in different regions? When your site goes down and for how long? 13

14 SUPPORT You Need Someone Who Ends The IT Hot Potato You ve got more than enough to worry about without wondering if your site has gone down, or if it s performing as well as it should. Many hosting providers draw the line at maintaining their network, without offering any support for application issues. If your campaign experiences an outage, you don t want to debate whose responsibility the outage is; you want it fixed, as quickly as possible. Look for a Managed Hosting provider who will monitor and maintain all aspects of your site infrastructure, including both network and application issues. The last thing you need is a provider who shrugs their shoulder s and says: hey, the network is up and running. It s not my problem. Ask how often your managed services hosting provider will review and maintain Hardware and operating system Uptime and traffic Servers and backups User accounts and security A Cost of Downtime study quantifies the costs of an unplanned data center outage at slightly more than $7,900 per minute. Can you afford to take chances with your hosting provider? 14

15 port Commitment 2 Commitment - How Can You Get More From Managed Hosting Provider? You Need Answers Imagine going to the doctor with a stomach complaint, and having him order blood tests to determine the cause of the problem. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Now imagine that when those results came back, your doctor simply handed you a sheet that gave you the number of milligrams per deciliter of your HDL, LDL, fibrinogen and hemoglobin. Would you know what steps to take? Would you even be able to recognize if those numbers indicted a problem? A managed services hosting provider who offers you a team of technical data on your web presence without any explanation, clarification or suggestions for next steps is a bit like that doctor. All the data in the world isn t helpful if you can t understand what it means. The right hosting provider for your team will be like a good doctor - they can expertly assess and diagnose problems 15

16 COMMITMENT The right hosting provider for your team will be like a good doctor - they can expertly assess and diagnose problems with your systems, but then also simplify those problems in a way you can understand, and provide you with actionable suggestions to improve problems or areas of concern. Ask your hosting provider for information that quickly and clearly communicates where your site is succeeding and where it is struggling, so you can take action to address issues right away. 16

17 COMMITMENT You Need Proactive Solutions Returning to the medical analogy, imagine if you had a doctor constantly monitoring your health and vital signs, able to increase your intake of vitamins or administer antibiotics without you even noticing. You d be sick a lot less often, and you d never have to telephone your doctor to ask what to do when you did feel under the weather, because he or shoe would already be addressing the problem for you. Sounds wonderful, doesn t it? Services That Make A Difference Daily Operational Support - day-to-day maintenance activities that are required for the error-free operation of the website or web application hardware and networking platform Website Uptime monitoring Medical science may not yet have made those kinds of strides, but Cloud hosting has. The right hosting provider won t wait for your site to go down before taking action, or for you to call and let them know that your site isn t performing as it should. A good managed services hosting provider is constantly monitoring your site s performance and traffic to catch errors and inefficiencies before problems arise. A great provider will even review your code and provide you with suggestions to improve resource-intensive scripts and applications, to ensure your end users enjoy the best possible experience. 17

18 COMMITMENT You Need Transparency Your managed services hosting provider is taking care of everything, which is convenient now, but does that mean your entire infrastructure could be held hostage if you ever discontinued your service? Look for a hosting provider that doesn t rely on trade secrets, proprietary information or inside knowledge to keep your services up and running. When you have full, detailed documentation of the infrastructure behind your entire system, you can be confident that, should your service ever be interrupted or discontinued, you have a complete roadmap to recreating your campaign. No matter how much you may trust your service provider, it s always prudent to put everything down on paper. No detail is too small to matter. Choose a Cloud Hosting Provider that will become an extension of your own team, just as invested in your success as you are. Services That Make A Difference The creation of a full End-to-End Network Topology and Specifications document that maps your entire system. You can take it to ANY hosting provider to get up and running, if you re ever unhappy. 80 % of Cloud adopters see improvements within 6 months of moving to the Cloud. By the end of 2015, end-user spending on Cloud services could be more than $180 billion. Choosing the right managed services hosting provider will help your company grow in the future. 18

19 Service Support Commitment Service Support Commitment Support Service We ll provide you with the hosting solutions you need, tailored exactly to your project. PointClick provides you with stable servers outfitted with failover systems to ensure your site and applications are always available. Our services are flexible and scalable to suit campaigns of all shapes and Commitment sizes. Support When you choose PointClick Technologies, you ll get more than just a hosting provider. We ll become a dedicated IT extension to your team, not only monitoring the service we provide to you, but also review and streamlining your systems, code and applications to ensure you re making the most of your resources. Our team is there for you, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year Commitment At PointClick Technologies, we don t do anything halfway. Our team will work with you every step of the way to ensure the success of your project. We re so confident that our service is second to none that we provide you will full documentation of your entire infrastructure. If at any time you are unhappy with your PointClick experience, you can discontinue your service and use the documents to replicate your hosting setup with another provider. Little things can make a big difference. Get in touch with us at PointClick Technologies today and let s discuss how our team can best meet your needs. (919) info[@]pointclick.net 4030 Wake Forest Rd Set 300 Raleigh, NC Copyright 2015 PointClick Technologies, LLC.