Expertise Managed Services

We host with the industry leading cloud server service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), for their reliability and premium uptime. fjorge is also an official Plesk Partner, which gains us access to server administration tools that enhance and automate many of our processes. This means our team can be more efficient when addressing server level requests and deployments. Depending on your plan level and website needs, fjorge offers both Shared and Dedicated hosting.

We have an AWS Certified dedicated SysAdmin on staff who’s primary focus is ensuring the security and efficiency of our servers, including server CPU monitoring as a proactive measure to catch spamming and other unusual activity.

Hosting services are included in our standard plan levels, so there is no additional monthly fee by hosting with fjorge. There is also no discount for hosting outside of fjorge AWS servers, because it ironically requires more involvement from our SysAdmin when deploying to external servers.

Our Uptime Guarantees are in alignment with AWS Service Level Agreements. Uptime Guarantee percentages are based on quarterly averages. A site is considered “down” if it fails our monitoring system health check. We monitor all sites covered by a fjorge Managed Service Plan, even when hosted outside of fjorge servers. However, our SLA only applies to sites hosted by fjorge.

Though there may be limitations to how fjorge can help with site outages on external servers, we will work the third party hosting provider and offer assistance where possible to get a site back up.

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is a protocol for sending information securely over the internet. When your site has a valid SSL Certificate, you’ll see a closed “lock” icon next to the browser URL bar.

fjorge monitors SSL Certificate Validation for all fjorge Managed Service sites. When hosted with fjorge, we also set up automatic renewal of SSL Certificates, or work with your team on custom SSL Renewals when a certificate needs to be provided to us. When not hosted with fjorge, we’ll let your team know when your SSL Certificate Validation is about to expire so you can work with your hosting provider to ensure it’s renewal.

We also monitor for “Mixed Content Warnings” which means your SSL Certificate is current, but you have individual assets on your site that are not secure. These are usually assets, such as images, links or files, that are from an insecure source. We can work with you to resolve those types of Mixed Content.

Performing routine backups of your site files and database are especially important in emergency situations where you need to revert to a prior version of your website, or need to quarantine your current site (due to potential malicious activity) and want to spin up an older/clean version of your site so visitors don’t experience a site outage.

For sites hosted with fjorge, automated backups are performed daily or weekly depending on the plan level. Backups are saved for 30 days.

Content Management Systems are the platform your website is built on. This platform is created by a community of developers who continually work to improve the security, functionality, and features of the platform. As a result, there are routine updates pushed out by the platform to all sites that use the platform. Any update release will include new code that gets added to your website in order to include these new features and security packages.

As great as this is, the updates have potential to cause issues on your site. Any time new code is added to existing code, there is a possibility of conflict. For this reason, fjorge Managed Services always performs updates on a staging environment and conducts a thorough QA to ensure the new code causes no issues, before deploying the update to your live site. If an issue does occur, we’ll attempt to manually fix it within your Updates Plan hours, or we’ll reach out with a recommendation and estimate. Sometimes our recommended course of action is to simply “wait” until the next update is released (like choosing not to install a computer Operating System update “until all the bugs are found.”).

Content Management System platforms don’t come “out of the box” with all the features you want, so your website is likely built with plugins as well. Plugins are built by other developers, and similar to your platform core, plugins release security and feature enhancement updates on a routine schedule.

The more plugins you have, the more external influence there is on your site’s performance. Keeping these plugins up to date with the latest releases will keep your site functioning properly. However, each release includes new code that could conflict with your existing code.

For this reason, fjorge Managed Services always performs updates on a staging environment and conducts a thorough QA to ensure the new code causes no issues, before deploying the update to your live site. If an issue does occur, we’ll attempt to manually fix it within your Updates Plan hours, or we’ll reach out with a recommendation and estimate. Sometimes our recommended course of action is to simply “wait” until the next update is released (like choosing not to install a computer Operating System update “until all the bugs are found.”).

Malware is any type of malicious code or program inserted into a site through security vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities occur on your site when technology is outdated, such as the CMS Core and Plugins, so keeping those up to date is a huge step in your site security. However, there are other types of technology that can also become outdated over time, such as the site’s coding language (ie PHP, JavaScript) or language library (ie jQuery, Angular, Node). Thirdly, servers and databases have technology that can get outdated overtime.

So, our fjorge Managed Services monthly updates process also includes malware scans to identify potential risks. If a medium or high risk is identified, we’ll create a “fjorge Recommendation” ticket with an estimate, and talk through a mitigation plan with you.

After CMS Core and Plugin updates have been performed on a staging environment, we do a QA (Quality Assurance) Review of your site to make sure there are no issues. We’ll then deploy the updates to your live site, and do another QA of your live site files. While the primary focus is to look for issues relating to the updates, we always have an eye out for user experience improvements we can recommend.

Note that QA Review is not a full audit of your site, however audits are a service we offer upon request. Technology best practice standards are ever changing because technology itself is ever changing. Your site is also ever changing with each Core/Plugin update, addition of content, and requested enhancement. Using the Plan Client Maintenance Request (CMR) hours, we can scan for ADA Compliance, SEO Best Practices, Site Speed/Performance Best Practices, Security Best Practices, and other types of audits.

Client Maintenance Request (CMR) hours is a monthly retainer of hours that gets you direct support from fjorge Managed Services staff, plus consultation with our UI/UX and Solutions Architect teams. These hours are commonly used for the following types of requests:

– CMS tutorial videos and staff onboarding
– Remediation of bug fixes
– Frontend and backend enhancements
– Consultation, brainstorming, estimating, and check-in calls
– On-Call/Emergency Response
– Collaboration with your other vendors (like an SEO Partner)
– Site Audits

Once the retainer hours have been used for the month, we can either pause until the next month’s retainer hours become available, or continue progress with Supplemental Budget approval.

The fjorge Managed Services team practices Time Tracking Transparency by way of our custom built CMR Tracker Tool. For eligible Managed Service plan levels, we provide a single link that can be used for the lifetime of our partnership. That link provides direct insights into how the CMR Plan Hours are being used each month, who’s tracking time, how much, when, and what for! The tool refreshes data each night, so each morning you have an idea of how many plan hours remain in the month for new requests.

Not only does this tool help to build trust and encourage open dialog about hours usage, it helps our clients to plan out their budget and get a better feel for how long certain types of requests typically take.