Manage

Considering the importance of Managed Services, it doesn't get the attention it should when vendors are evaluating website design and development companies. The importance of a well designed and built website should not be discounted, but the managed services that follow can make or break the initiative. A managed services agreement will protect your initial investment. If this ongoing maintenance and support agreement isn't a win-win for both parties, you are at risk of not seeing a return on your investment.

Things you should look for in a solid managed services agreement:

Support Team.  We are your partners in technology and will staff a team that recognizes your needs and works toward a solution to any problem, concern or need. Consider Five an extension to your team and a resource you can lean on as needed. We can play a small role or take full responsibility for an initiative, as our team starts where your team falls off.  Trust that we will always be there!

Emergency / High Priority Needs.  Five Technology understands that you will require immediate attention from time to time on urgent or critical issues. As a result, we provide a feasible option that permits you to vault these requests to the top of the queue and receive immediate attention. Our clients are given the opportunity to make an upfront purchase of a set number of High Priority Support hours. These hours will be used for requests that require immediate attention, and time logged to complete the task will go against the remaining amount. Think of it as a bank of service hours reserved for emergency.

All Other Requests.  Requests that are not categorized as High Priority Support will be quoted and schedule accordingly. Upon submission of the request, the account manager /consultant will review the request and determine the requirements for the completion of the request. An estimated cost to design, implement, and test is sent to the client for review. Upon sign-off of the request, a time line will be provided to communicate the intended completion date for the item. Upon testing of the completed item, we will request sign-off on the completion thus communicating that the item has been completed to satisfaction.

Dedicated Account Management / Technology Consulting.  A dedicated consultant is assigned to your account to manage online initiatives and technology decisions. We schedule planning and strategy sessions to create, evaluate, and prioritize projects, tasks and initiatives. Monthly meetings are also scheduled to discuss the past month’s achievements as well as objectives for the month ahead. This dedicated person will provide pro-active consulting based on business objectives and available technologies. We are the Internet marketing experts and are eager to translate our expertise to your industry. Online project management will be provided so an open line of communication between the two teams is established.  Our objective is to incorporate your team as much as possible, with teaching and support being critical components to the end goal.

Web Hosting / Infrastructure.  Website downtime is no longer acceptable, no matter what your online objectives are. Our web hosting infrastructure utilizes best in technology to achieve reliability, performance, and up time. We'll put together a hosting plan that matches your requirements exactly, and evaluate and adjust as needed moving forward. Things you should look for as part of your web hosting scope:

Dedicated or Shared Virtual Server. This is based on resource consumption, but virtual servers have reduced hosting costs and eliminated hardware investment.  

• Web server resides at Tier I Data Center with 24/7/365 on-site security
• Processors, disk space, dedicated bandwidth, burstable bandwidth and memory (RAM) are the important metrics when evaluating virtual server options
• Web Server Administration and Package Updates – Our host management team takes a pro-active approach to monitoring to ensure web servers are always performing at optimal levels.  Server updates occur as needed behind the scenes.  DNS (Bind), Firewall (IP Tables), Email (Postfix, Cyrus), Kernel (Linux Kernel), Remote Access (Open SSH), Htdig Search Engine, Web Server (Apache), Middleware (PHP), Database (postgreSQL), etc.

Web Services.  Software and services running on the web server require proactive monitoring and maintenance to reduce downtime.

• Content Management System (CMS) requires software upgrades, bug fixes and security patches
• WordPress Blog – Management and maintenance of the software as new versions, updates and bug fixes are available
• 3rd Party Software and Services

Offsite Data Back-up.  If tragedy strikes, be comfortable knowing your data is not lost

•  Nightly backup of all web server data to an offsite location
• Back-ups are available for the previous 7 days from the current day. Prior to the previous 7 days, back-ups are kept in weekly increments. Prior to the previous 4 weeks, back-ups are kept in monthly increments. Monthly increments are only kept for the previous 3 months.
• Custom offsite back-up rotations are available upon special request.

High Availability.  All our virtual servers reside at recognized and trusted data centers with High Availability block level mirroring configuration for faster fail-over times should problems occur.

Daily Pro-active Monitoring.  Dedicated junior developers are assigned to pro-actively monitor the host environment, looking for areas of concern on daily basis. This will include monitoring of the server logs to see what processes are being overloaded or are potential problem areas that need attention.

As you can see, a lot of attention goes into making sure our web hosting infrasture is operational 24x7x365 so that your online business can operate at peak level at all times.