Hosting for your web application
As you may or may not know, Bad Dinosaur offers a fully-managed hosting package for your web application. There are a few companies that provide a similar service, but the experience a friend of ours had recently with their web host got us thinking about why we even started offering this in a first place.
We’ve been developing web applications for years, but one sore point was always web hosting. We’d seen it all: from hosts with hard-drives prone to fail, to hosts changing their pricing by 5000% overnight (yes, this really did happen).
One of my past webhost’s data centres went down and took 16 hours to come back — the cause was snow blocking the on-call employee’s route. We’d had 5mm of snow.
We started offering managed web hosting a few months after we delivered our first MVP. With the web hosting market being pretty terrible, we didn’t feel right recommending web hosts that we had poor experiences with. The only logical choice was to start our own web hosting service, of course!
Reliability
Reliability is key. Our managed hosting includes 24/7/365 monitoring and engineer support as standard. This means we’ve got systems checking the site constantly, and we’re alerted if it ever starts running slowly or stops working completely.
One example scenario might be if you went viral in America at 2am GMT and the servers couldn’t handle it anymore — rather than not finding out until 9am and missing out on sales, one of our team will get an automated phone call as it happens, get out of bed and resolve the issue.
Security
We also handle all of the security for the application. We provide SSL and automatic threat detection as standard for all our clients. We have systems checking and blocking like automated hacks and “denial of service” attacks, which are surprisingly common — I’ve just had a look and our system has stopped 81 attacks in the last 24 hours (2,615 attacks in the last 28 days) on just one of the web applications we manage..!
While we’re on the subject of security: the operating systems, firmware and other software are kept up to date, with all security patches and performance updates installed frequently, rather than just being abandoned and left to die. Again, security of web applications is a huge (and growing) concern.
Okay, there’s probably not a “hackerman” trying to get access to your infrastructure night and day, but there are loads of automated threats running round the clock trying to gain access or infect your servers.
In the clouds
All of our infrastructure and services are cloud-based and scalable. The people setting up your infrastructure really know infrastructure. We also know your code, because we wrote it. So if something goes wrong with your web application, we’re a single point of contact for everything.
You won’t get passed around a call centre or between different lines of support, because you will always get through to an engineer located at our Edinburgh or Glasgow office — we don’t outsource any of our support team.
We know your app
If you’ve developed your web application with us, we will know your app inside and out. We can quickly understand if it’s a server problem or an app problem, and take whatever measures we need to resolve the issue.
The key benefit to having one team manage both the development and the hosting is that there is nobody to pass the blame to. Web hosts love to blame the developers, and vice versa. In our setup, we just have to get on and fix it!
Human speak
Finally, we don’t speak tech to you. You don’t need to know about SSL certificates or databases or anything of the sort. We’ll handle it all, and you can concentrate on growing your new business.
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Russ Peterson is a director of Bad Dinosaur, a software design and development agency in Scotland focused on building Minimum Viable Products through lean/agile, a collaborative “co-design” process, and good communication.
Find out more at www.baddinosaur.co.uk/services/mvp
