Website Hosting & Support

Your website directly impacts your business, thus you want to ensure maintenance and upkeep is being done. We can help with that.

We offer website support whether it’s a new plug-in installation, an update, a programming issue or a server malfunction, just to name a few. Leave your tech issues to our team of skilled tech professionals. With superior client service, we’ll be there every step of the way.

Van West Media Web Hosting Services

Van West Media provides its clients with fully managed web-hosting services, individually configured to match the client’s unique business needs.

OVERVIEW: VAN WEST MEDIA HOSTING SOLUTIONS

Van West Media host all clients’ websites on dedicated virtual hosting servers,

most typically equipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Debian (Ubuntu) operating systems, with Apache 2.4 and Nginx 1.6.2 HTTP servers, MySQL Database server (or its high performance version, Percona), PHP 5.4 as a main server-side programming language, ModSecurity firewall for data protection, and Postfix mail package. Van West Media also provides Windows servers with ASP.NET as a server-side programming language, and Microsoft SQL database servers to the clients whose business needs are best served with such solution.

Van West Media monitors all the hosting web servers containing clients’ websites 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year, using the industry standard web monitoring services. Thanks to the effective use of these services, our team’s average response time to a server incident alert is 1.284 seconds.

Van West Media creates regular automatic backups (daily, weekly, and / or custom, depending on the client’s requirements) of the entire array of servers, including the website files, databases, and server configurations. We provide storage of two weeks to several months worth of backup servers, depending on the individual need of each client.

Van West Media’s experienced, trained server administrators control the hosting servers via Secure Socket Shell (SSH), Secure Copy (SCP), and Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), using latest models of premium Mac and PC computers with up-to-date operating systems, and software such as iTerm, Coda, PuTTY, Cyberduck, and Filezilla.

THE DEETS: VAN WEST MEDIA HOSTING SOLUTIONS

Our hosting infrastructure offers the following advantages:

• Scalability (this means that even during sudden spikes of traffic as a result of a recent newsletter campaign or due to your business being featured in the news, your website hosted on Van West Media-owned servers is not likely to experience downtime)

• Elasticity (the hosting service is assembled out of hundreds of instantly replaceable modules, allowing to make any necessary modifications within shortest time, to match your most urgent business needs)

• Flexibility (full support for near-infinite number of software packages and programming languages, allowing Van West Media to select best technical solutions to meet the strategic goals of your business)

• Data security as the underlying foundation on which the entire array of services is built (while no website or web application is completely hack-proof, and hacking attacks online had become an almost everyday occurrence, the structure of our hosting service provides unprecedented level of security control)

• Cost effectiveness (within the market of industrial level hosting solutions, Van West Media’s hosting service is within the rage of reasonably affordable, while being the most robust)

Current (regularly updated) list of web services offered by Van West Media for our clients includes the following:

• Domain Routing – we can select, register and host brand and search engine marketing domain names for our clients, manage domain redirection and canonicalization, modify or add A, CNAME, MX, and TXT records, and much more.

Thanks to global infrastructure of our underlying technical system, whenever a domain name records are modified (for example, when a domain name is pointed to a new web hosting server, or to an updated clone version of the existing website), the worldwide domain name propagation takes minutes, rather than hours as is the case with the majority of other domain name routing solutions. This allows us great flexibility in switching websites between hosting servers, whenever a server needs an upgrade or repair.

One of the most valuable features we offer to our clients is the geo-location routing, allowing us to enable recognize the geographic location of each individual user accessing our client’s web resource, and serve that resource from the data center closest to the location of the user. As a result, our clients can enjoy the maximum performance of their websites and applications, in any geographic location.

• Dedicated Virtual Hosting Servers – the workhorse of Van West Media web hosting services, and the home of all our client’s websites and web applications.

Each hosting server is a powerful virtual computer that can be accessed and operated exactly in the same way one would access a regular computer. The additional advantage of virtualization is the ability to create new computers, clone or modify existing ones, or configure them by installing or removing virtual hardware and software in a matter of minutes, at a click of a button. This allows Van West Media to create backup clones of any website or server for our client, create development and staging servers out of existing live websites, clone a staging server and convert it into a live one, and so on. A number of these tasks can be completed very fast, compared to all other hosting solutions, which allows us to minimize cost.

All our clients’ hosting instances are protected against accidental deletion, and even when the hosting server had been closed, the underlying data volume is kept in storage, allowing us to great additional data recovery capabilities.

Every server is protected with its own custom-configured virtual firewall, allowing Van West Media technicians to open or close any of the server ports. As a rule, all live servers are protected by a “minimum access” type of a firewall, allowing only necessary access to the server for a limited number of Van West Media technicians, while opening the public pages of clients websites or web applications to the regular user traffic from anywhere in the world. (Additional security configurations are implemented on the server software level, such as ModSecurity firewall, and in every website configuration settings via website-level security solutions, for example iThemes Security Pro for WordPress). Van West Media technical team uses only secure web transfer protocols for accessing the hosting instances. No unencrypted access to the server (such as regular, non-secure FTP) is provided. To access a hosting instance, Van West Media server administrators use individually assigned private keys, rather than regular passwords, which allows extra layer of access security, not unlike palm or fingerprint recognition hardware.

Every hosting server is assigned a unique public IP address – a numeric identifier that allows traffic from the web to access a server. Every IP address assigned to Van West Media hosting servers is “elastic”. Whereas a regular IP address, used by the majority of other hosting companies, can only be associated with one server, and is “destroyed” whenever the server is taken out of operation, an elastic IP address persists after it has been detached from its destination server, and can be attached to another server, or reattached to the original one after repair or upgrade work had been performed on it. This elasticity allows Van West Media maximum flexibility in managing server resources for our clients, and enables us to switch a domain name to a new server, hosting a new or updated version of the client’s website – with zero downtime.

A virtual hosting server could be created in any of the multiple geographic regions across the globe, depending on the desired “fastest access” region for each individual client. We also have the ability to host a website or a web application simultaneously on several virtual dedicated servers located in different geographical regions, and display the website from the server closest in geographic location to each user accessing it.

Van West Media stores hundreds of automatically created regular backup copies of all our clients hosting servers, as well as snapshots and data storage volumes. This gives Van West Media the unprecedented data recovery capabilities. Even in the most unlikely event of the complete web application destruction as a result of massive hacking attack, Van West Media can resurrect the website from a backup, often within minutes after receiving our client’s request for data recovery, with data loss contained to minimum or none.

Depending on the amount of memory and computational power needed for individual client’s web solution, we may choose to host the database on the same server as website / web application – or to allocated a separate server, hosting only the database. Hosting the database separately allows extra layer of data security and noticeable increase in software performance.