Managed Website & Hosting Services

Orbit offers both managed website and managed hosting services. Managed website services ensure your site is always available and your CMS platform and plugins are up-to-date.

Managed hosting services make it easy to keep your site secure and your environment current. In both cases, Orbit deals directly with your host so you don’t have to.

Learn a little bit about Orbit and how we do business.

Availability

Orbit utilizes industry standard monitoring tools, security software, and relies on the expert services of hosting partners to ensure your website is available 24/7.

UPTIME MONITORING: With the latest in monitoring services like Statuscake.com, Orbit is always aware of a website outage. Additionally, Orbit hosting partners provide server monitoring during non-business hours.
SECURITY AND PREVENTION: Orbit can help prevent and troubleshoot malicious activity on your website whether it is brute-force access attempts, bot traffic, or a legitimate user behaving badly. We utilize security plugins, dual authentication, and server-side software to “blackhole” the IP addresses of potentially malicious users.
PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION: What makes a website perform badly? Outdated plugins, increasing amounts of data, poorly compressed images, 3rd party code to name a few. Another might be due to the website’s success of generating more traffic than the web server can handle! Orbit’s managed website and support services are available to help troubleshoot, update, and provide other recommendations to boost the performance of your site.

CMS Maintenance

Open Source website software requires frequent updates because vulnerabilities and exploits are discovered constantly. Orbit’s managed website and support services are available to ensure your CMS platform is up to date.

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM UPDATES: The most common reason for a content management system core update is due to security. Sometimes these updates are considered an emergency, and our hosting providers like WP Engine informs us of immediate deployments of updated versions of WordPress. If there will be an impact during business hours, Orbit then notifies you of these updates and downtime expectations.
PLUGIN UPDATES: Though not as essential to a healthy website as the CMS updates, plugin updates need frequent attention. However, these updates tend to be more risky when deployed as they can conflict with latest CMS updates or custom website code. Orbit support services are always available to upgrade plugins upon request.

Your Hosting Partner

All hosting partners – Steadfast, Blackmesh, WPEngine and Pantheon – provide managed services related to security in the form of regularly scheduled server software updates, intrusion detection, monitoring, and malware scans.

Orbit’s support team includes support managers, website administrators, developers, and server admins. This combination of skill-sets allows us to troubleshoot issues extremely quickly on our own but more importantly ask the most direct questions to the hosting providers. We serve as interpreters and interface with the hosting providers on your behalf to get you the highest level of technical service.

Server Monitoring with Nagios

Orbit uses an open-source monitoring system called Nagios.

We utilize this system to alert the support team of server performance issues and outages.

Alerts when critical systems near overload or failure
Email and SMS notifications of critical service failure and recovery
Orbit attempts to restore the server or contact hosting provider during regular business hours
Proactive Zenoss monitoring through Blackmesh and Steadfast
Server monitoring and WordPress security monitoring by WPEngine

Daily Backup Service

Orbit’s hosting service includes daily backup solutions. Standard backup services are provided to clients at no additional cost. These services include servers that run a web-accessible backup program called R1Soft Continuous Data Protection (CDP). This system is configured to create incremental daily backups of changed files for five days.

Orbit also creates a daily backup of the database to the webserver to quickly restore the entire database if needed (which is extremely rare). If a more robust backup solution is required, a separate service or hosting agreement will be provided to the client.

Check out some of the sites we host

Family Rescue

Mary Cook

Capannari Ice Cream

Performance Maintenance

ENVIRONMENT HARDWARE MAINTENANCE & UPGRADES – Hardware maintenance and upgrades are managed by Steadfast.net as needed, usually due to hardware failures. Upgrades are requested by Orbit for performance and security reasons. Steadfast provides and installs hardware replacements and upgrades. See Steadfast.net regarding Steadfast’s SLA regarding maintenance. Orbit Support will notify the client of website downtime due to hardware updates.
WEBSITE FORM MONITORING & TESTING – Form activity is logged and reported in Mighty-Site for clients to use as a backup to emails not received. It is advised that clients audit this report, as email delivery is not 100% reliable. Each week, Orbit will report and test all Mighty-Site driven websites that did not record a successful send form action in the last seven days to ensure that the send form is properly scripted and configured. Clients may receive a test email sent by Orbit verifying that the form is working properly.

SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE & UPGRADES – Orbit hosting partners maintain all software installed on all servers and will upgrade the software as needed for performance and security reasons. Orbit Support will notify the client of website downtime due to software updates if this occurs during business hours.
WEBSITE HOSTING UPGRADES – At times, Orbit will advise a client to move their website to a different environment – for example from Shared Website Hosting to Dedicated Website Hosting. Reasons include but are not limited to:

The website receives significantly more traffic than other websites on that server, causing poor server performance.
Large file and/or data storage requirements
Specific security concerns due to client systems integration

Orbit Hosting Support

Orbit’s Support team is available to address any website hosting issues. Visit our Support page to contact the team or submit a ticket on the Orbit Support Portal. All support services are provided according to our Support Policy.

How well do you know your web host?

Orbit’s web hosting packages are based on your individual requirements so you never have to feel like you’re settling. Because Orbit designs and develops the sites we host, we also maintain the environments. Take advantage of robust hosting plans by partnering with us.

Host My Site