When undertaking any project you can be assured that FeO Consulting will always operate in good faith and take your best interests into consideration as we design and implement a solution to best meet your needs. There are several areas that should be of concern to an potential client:
Hosting
The web server that your site or application resides on is just as important as the code it is written in. A poorly configured or under-powered server can cause a number of issues. As such when your site is developed we configure a server for it as well. You are not required to use our server, but we strongly recommend it. Why?
1) When there is a problem, and at some point there will be, you have one person to contact. We have our contacts as well. So when we have a problem we know how to contact our tech support for our servers. If your site is hosted on your own server then that is just one more chain of support that we will have to manage, and thus we will bill for it.
2) We know our server configurations. And we tune our sites for those configurations. Available RAM, CPU usage, storage, and bandwidth are all factored in the design of the site.
3) We use one of the largest hosting companies (rackspace.com). This assures you that your site isn’t running on a six year old computer in someone’s basement. Our servers are managed by their team of experts and monitored 24/7 (as is the standard)
We do charge a nominal fee of $15 a month on an annual basis for basic hosting. From a technical aspect, this includes 1k CPU cycles a month. The first question most people ask is… “How many visitors will that be?” The answer to that depends on the complexity of your site. A single page with static content uses a fraction of the CPU cycles per page load than a dynamic site with multiple data connections per page. The short answer though is that this more than enough to cover 95% of the sites that we host.
If your site is generating more traffic than the basic level then we’ll have a discussion on what options are available.
Regardless of the level of server that you have you will be given full FTP credentials to your site. We strongly recommend that you download and keep a copy of all of your files.
Caching and Firewalls
We utilize an external firewall system in front of all of our websites. When we configure your site we will also establish a profile on your behalf with this system. You will also receive those credentials so that you can manage that system if needed. The system has different service levels depending on your site’s needs. We have found that the basic level provides an ample level of service for most of our clients. You can read more, if you’re so inclined, at https://www.cloudflare.com/plans.
There is requirement that you change your DNS servers for your domain to point to the firewall system.
Software
With most of the sites we develop we utilize some type of external software system such as WordPress or other Content Management System. As we are not in direct control of this software we cannot guarantee that it will be free from errors or that it will work exactly as you feel that it should. We are also not in control of security updates or other software updates for these software systems. We will make recommendations to you concerning updates to the software running on their sites or applications but it is up to you to authorize us to make those updates as these updates are billable events.
Ownership of the product
When we develop a site or application for you, you are the owner of the final product and will have full access to all source code and database design. In the event that we use third party software such as WordPress themes or plugins to develop your site you will be subject to the license terms of those software packages.