We Are Dedicated to Provide Secure, Reliable Service
Here at Blue Zenith, we are dedicated to serving our clients. A lot of businesses say that or make similar statements, but not every business will actually follow through on what they promise. For seven years, we have dedicated ourselves to designing beautiful, functional and versatile websites for our clients and providing digital branding and marketing services. We have always strived to provide the services and expertise our clients need to establish a robust and complete online presence, with the tools and knowledge necessary to utilize that online presence to attract, funnel and convert an online audience into new clients and customers. After a number of years spent working with our clients after their websites were designed, built and launched and facing the ongoing challenges involved with keeping those sites updated and secure, we realized that in order to fully serve our clients, we had to offer more – we needed to offer additional, ongoing hosting, maintenance and security services that truly allow our clients to reap the benefits of having a modern, functional and secure website without the distractions involved with maintaining, updating and securing it.
Does your company need support with hosting, maintaining and securing your website? It depends on how much work and responsibility you want to take on yourself, and how important your website is to your business on an ongoing basis
Why Do I Need An Ongoing Subscription Plan?
One of the most difficult and uncomfortable aspects of expanding our services to hosting, maintaining and securing websites is explaining why we are now offering a subscription service, which we understand sounds suspiciously like an “upsell.” As we have done for years, we still offer our traditional web design services, providing our clients with the ability to choose whether they want to manage their own web hosting and maintain and secure their own website or if they want to contract Blue Zenith to provide those services. Should you manage your own website hosting, maintenance and security, or should you outsource it to us? As we mentioned earlier in this post, a lot of it depends on the overall importance of your website to your business.
A Website Needs To Be Upgraded
Your website has many components, but the primary “backbone” of your website is the Content Management System (CMS), which, much like the operating on your laptop or phone, is the underlying software that manages and powers your website, and just like the operating system on your laptop or phone, this software has to be periodically upgraded. These upgrades can provide extra functionality, but they mainly provide necessary security updates that can help prevent website hacks and infections that can threaten both you and your customers. In addition to the CMS, other components of your website may need to be upgraded as well, depending on the CMS used and any features or functions that were added at the time the website was designed and built. For instance, the basic functionality of a WordPress website or blog can be greatly expanded through the use of plugins, or software packages that are added to a WordPress installation. While plugins can be extremely useful, they too must also be periodically upgraded to keep your website functional and secure.
Managing your own website upgrades requires an intermediate level of technical knowledge and expertise, as you are required to interact with your CMS admin panel and you may be required to apply some manual fixes if an upgrade causes problems with your existing website configuration or even causes it to crash. Some CMS systems such as WordPress now provide periodic security-based upgrades for free, but major upgrades from one version to another still require a manual upgrade. When you choose to have your website maintenance outsourced, upgrades are handled entirely by our team, taking the hassle and worry out of upgrading your website.
In our next post, we will discuss the differences in website hosting configurations and the importance of monitoring your website for hacks, infections and intrusions.