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With over 10 years proven expertise in website design, we’ve worked with many of the most popular hosting providers. So, we know the difference between low-end hosting and hosting with both solid infrastructure and industry-leading service. Yardstick Services uses a high-quality cloud hosting provider that makes our business of creating vibrant, flawlessly functioning websites that much easier. We evaluate our hosting provider on an annual basis and have switched providers in the past when changes in technology, infrastructure and/or service require us to do so. Therefore, we are committed to a certain quality of hosting and not tied to any one provider.

6 Things We Demand Of Our Website Hosting Provider

From exceptional server uptimes, state-of-the-art infrastructure, proactive security practices to industry-leading service, here are just a few things we look for in our web-hosting provider:

1. Fast Support. We need 24/7 support with instant reply times over the phone or through an online live chat, or a 10-minute response time if we post a support ticket in their ticketing system. This ensures that we can respond to client issues timely and efficiently.
2. Staging Functionality. Instead of “cowboy coding” (developer speak for making changes without a safety net), the staging environment allows us to develop on a clone of your live site, acquire your approval, and proceed to push it live, resulting in a much cleaner development process.
3. CMS Features. We require hosts that specifically set their infrastructure up for WordPress and Joomla and offer features to support the deployment and maintenance of our preferred CMS’s. Special features include CMS automatic updates, daily backups, server level protection, and account isolation.
4. Security. We need to know that our hosting company is monitoring the security of their infrastructure as well as our clients’ websites. We look for companies that have security experts who regularly monitor for WordPress and Joomla related weaknesses and initiate preemptive safeguards for their users to keep them well protected.
5. SLA. A service-level-agreement or SLA is something that hosting companies provide that says (in legal speak) that they guarantee 99.9% (or better) uptime. This legally binding guarantee doesn’t prevent issues from happening, but it does indicate that the company is willing to put its reputation on the line and stand by the hosting service it is offering.
6. Updated Server Software. Many hosting companies get complacent or don’t have the resources or infrastructure to keep their servers running with the most current versions of Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP and other server-side software essential to hosting a website. We monitor the technology being used by our web host and ensure that the most-recent stable versions of this software is being used and maintained by them. This further ensures that our clients’ websites are functioning and secure.

If you are having a challenge with the security or maintenance of your WordPress or Joomla website, please contact us and we can tell you more about our worry-free Maintenance & Support plan.