WordPress Cloud Hosting is fast becoming essential for the 60 million users worldwide. There are, however a lot of options when it comes to choosing your Cloud hosting provider. It is difficult to know that the promise of more uptime and safe data will be kept once you have started with a Cloud hosting service provider. But there is a way which can reassure you that a host will provide what you want —service level agreements (SLA).
There are certain elements of a WordPress Cloud Hosting SLA which will be key to your site in particular, but there are few generic considerations which are important for nearly all web pages and businesses. Let us look at three key areas.
Security
This is your business on the line and the security of your information is paramount. There are certain plugins and scripts that you may think are security concerns —you should ensure that these are specifically mentioned in your service level agreement. A mention of firewalls should also be made, along with PHP settings. Aside from this, there are measures to be taken by the host themselves. An SLA should state which country the data is being stored in, as the legal and regulatory necessities in some countries are different. There should also be a mention of specifically what the host can do to prevent hacking from external sources.
Maximizing Uptime
You must consider that any downtime is going to cost your business money. Having a statement regarding uptime which delegates responsibility of remediation in the event of downtime in a clear manner is a must. There may also be different reasons for a loss of uptime, which affect who is at fault and these statements should be checked. For instance, the host may take responsibility if loss of uptime is caused by the servers, but may state that a failure caused by an influx in website traffic beyond a certain amount, is out of their control. Once the site is back up, it may be stipulated in an SLA that there should be service credits given to the customer to recompense them for their loss in business. A service credit is usually awarded if the uptime percentage for a time period (usually a month), does not meet certain thresholds. For example, a small credit may be given for less than 99.9% uptime —a larger credit for less than 99% uptime and so on.
Backup
If all the information is stored in only one location, then in the event of the destruction of that location (unlikely but it does happen in the real world) —you will lose everything. If you think of the time and money it took to build your web pages from the ground up, you’ll realize that it is definitely worth having a clause in the SLA with your WordPress Cloud Hosting service provider which states there must be off-site backups.
The importance of having these key points in a document cannot be overstated. Whether or not your website is a major part of your business, poor WordPress cloud hosting allowed by a not having an SLA in place will cost you. It is recommended to only work with a cloud hosting provider which has a service level agreement as a matter of course in their business model.