Hosting

Hosting:
We rent servers from Aplus or Marlin for our clients. Aplus pricing is expensive in the industry. It costs us about €500 per month per server. A single server however can run many sites, probably around 100 sites. But we try to run 4 – 6 sites per server. This makes them much more responsive and pulls sites up faster. Some site are more demanding than others on server capacity, so we may have to dedicate one server to one site.

You could deal with Aplus directly, but we would not recommend it. It’s like using a sledge hammer to put a thumbtack in a cork board or self building your house. We strongly suggest hosting on one of our servers. Client sites will be one of a small number of sites on each particular server (and may be backed up on another separate server). Rest assured, that even though, there would be a small number of sites on the server there would be no overlap of information. Each site is behind a secure file system and the server is further secured by a firewall.
Naturally we can give Clients full FTP access to their directory, if required. We do not recommend FTP-ing anything to pr from the directory. The access is given for client comfort only. All information management is done through the administrative functions of the site. We run an MS SQL Server for database speed and reliability, I-Mail or MailEnable, industry gold standard mail software, a firewall, and if Clients should ever require it we have an SSL cert facility.

Statistics:
When we first started running sites we were using Webtrends, then we graduated to Urchin ( which has been bought by Google) and now we are looking at a newer more independent, option. Again it will be the industry gold standard. A little more expensive but worth the money. It is not in your interest to have Google track your stats. We have started tracking activity. You can view this any time at a designated url which we give each Client, such as;

client.harvardinnovations.com:10000
username: clientgivenusername
password: clientaccesspassword

We provide all this for about 140 euro a month for demanding sites. We strongly recommend hosting on these servers as they have very low traffic and the googlebot is always visiting it, yahoo’s spider too. But perhaps most importantly we update the servers regularly as well as our software. You may have noticed that NetPress, thats our CMS Content Management System, is up to version 4 beta at the moment. It will be at 4.01 soon. and we update all applications seamlessly on our servers. On a “foreign server” things could get hairy. Again, the cost of the service on these servers and all software is only about 140 euro per month for a demanding site.

Previewing the Site:
There is currently an allowance for previewing a page on the site before it goes live. We have to be honest here and say that our Clients have opened our eyes for the need for a robust preview and release system. It was incorporated into NetPress Version 3.0 in September 2009. However please note that there is a “preview of page” after creating or editing in the administrative backend.

Name Servers:
Ns1.marliness.net   Ns2.marliness.net    Please let us know the full URL of the site that will be directed.

Conclusion:
The 'NET' sees changes every single day and the giants try to control how things are done, so we need to stay on top of all the changes. This can only be done, by having people study the changes, their effects and work out which changes benefit which Clients. It is like having children at college, but we pay the fees and you benefit from the knowledge gained, which, in turn, is used to develop solutions for you and you pay us to fund all this development., to the benefit of both of our companies. Using our designated servers allows us access to make necessary changes for your benefit.