WordPress is the CMS platform of choice for all the websites we build. And once it goes live, we provide on-going hosting and support.

WordPress is a fantastic Content Management System and there are many reasons why it is the most popular CMS in the world. It is fairly easy to set up and get a website working and the ways in which it can be customised is just about without limitation. But there are some big catches that you need to be aware of. Because WordPress is hosted on your own web server you can’t afford to set and forget. Here are the main considerations when setting up or running a WordPress site:

1) Security

Due to the popularity of WordPress there are a lot of not-so-desirable programmers looking for ways to exploit its code and use your web server for their own purposes! If they get in to your website, they can use your server to send out spam email, access details of your customers, delete or mess up your website or a range of other nasty things. This is why it is crucial to keep your website up to date with the latest release of the WordPress core as well as to ensure you use good quality plug-ins and also keep them up to date. You should also have security in place to protect your install against attacks and use secure passwords. 

At CubeMedia we keep all of our client websites up to date with the latest releases of WordPress and the latest versions of all plug-ins. It’s just part of our service.

2) Speed

WordPress needs a good platform to run on to get the best speed. Shared hosting may be cheap but will often give you times of slowness as you are sharing resources with many other websites. At CubeMedia we use WordPress only Virtual Private Servers (VPS) which means that only our clients are on our servers and we can scale resources as and when they are required. We take care of all the technical bits and pieces so you don’t have to. 

3) Backups

Backups are vital for so many reasons – hardware failure, hacking or honest mistakes can result in your website being damaged or completely destroyed. This is where backups are vital. From backups you can restore your website to a previous working version, undo your mistake or even move your website from one server to another. At CubeMedia we do daily and weekly backups of all of our clients websites automatically and these are backed up both locally and onto our remote server just in case something wrong happens with the main web server. We can restore a website from backups in a matter of minutes.

4) Updates

As we stated above it is vital to update your WordPress core and plug-ins, but also it is important to update your website on a regular basis. This means logging in, checking the information you have on the site and updating / changing anything that is out of date, plus adding some new content on a regular basis. CubeMedia also offer content strategy packages for our clients that mean we review and add content for our clients on a monthly basis. This is great for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and also for customer perception as they will see your website is being regularly updated with useful, relevant information. 

At CubeMedia we want all our customers to get the most out of their website so our monthly hosting packages come with all these great features:

a) Fast, local VPS servers that are WordPress only and only for our clients
b) Updates to WordPress and all plug-ins as they are released
c) Protection against Brute Force attacks on your WordPress site
d) Scanning for any viruses, malware or other nasties
e) Ongoing protection against attacks – including IP blocking for known attackers
f) An SSL Certificate for data encryption to ensure safe browsing on your website (worth $60 pa)
f) Gravity Forms on all websites (worth $55 pa)
g) Daily and Weekly automatic backups to the server and remote storage (worth $95 pa)

All for only $50+GST per month for a small website, $65+GST per month for a large site or an ecommerce store.

Running a wordpress multi-site or a number of wordpress websites? Talk to us about your own VPS WordPress solution with wordpress tools and management included.