Fully Managed Hosting
Pooka & Co’s Fully Managed Hosting will take care of your website ‘under the bonnet’, leaving your team free to focus on what’s important: Creating great content.
Pooka & Co host every website that we build and occasionally take over the hosting and management of existing websites, prior to rebuilding them. We take care of all WordPress and plugin updates, backups, uptime monitoring, firewalls, reporting, SSL certificates and more.
From simple ‘shared hosting’ environments, to dedicated and scalable Cloud hosting packages, Pooka & Co will recommend and provide fully managed hosting to suit the needs of your website, and your budget.
Analytics, Reporting & Annual Reviews
To keep you up to date (but not overwhelmed) with the upkeep of your website, each month we’ll send you a short report. This report will detail your site’s uptime during the previous month, any updates that we’ve performed to WordPress and its associated plugins and software, the regular website backups we’ve performed, and highlights from your website’s analytics.
Regular checking of your website analytics will help you understand the people who are using your website, and help inform the content you create, or any new functionality that you plan to make. For analytics, Pooka & Co recommend installing Google Tag Manager. This enables the simple integration of Google Analytics 4, plus further tags for any external platform integrations that you might need.
Each year as we approach the renewal date of your website hosting, Marcus & Paul, Pooka & Co’s Directors will conduct a thorough manual review of your site. We’ll then invite you to an Annual Review where we can explore our findings, understand any areas that you might be thinking about designing, developing or changing, and perhaps offer a few suggestions of our own. This tends to be a great time to have a general catch-up and often leads to development ideas being generated later in the year.
Full Software Updates
WordPress, WooCommerce, CiviCRM and their landscape of plugins and extensions are constantly changing. New software versions are released regularly to address issues with security and to introduce new features. Without these upgrades, your website can quickly become outdated or insecure. At Pooka & Co, we keep on top of website updates so that you don’t have to.
We’ll roll out the most important security updates to your website as soon as they’re available, and add new feature updates as quickly as we feel they’re stable (typically monthly). We’ll also keep you informed in the rare case that it’s not possible to update software on your website (for example where software is no longer supported by a plugin developer) to ensure that a timely workaround can be found.
“Pooka & Co not only have expert knowledge of web site design and hosting but also possess a genuine ability to share it with the client.”
John Saich
Music Producer & Arts Consultant
Uptime, Security, Backups & Recovery
With online threats ever on the increase, keeping your website secure has never been more important, but Pooka & Co have you covered. Within your Fully Managed Hosting service, we’ll manage SSL certification, ensuring that all communications between your website and your users are secure, and that your users see the reassuring “Padlock” icon in their browser whenever they visit your site.
We’ll also provide firewalls at both application and server level, to block suspicious looking traffic before it can cause problems. In addition, we’ll scan all of the files on your website on a daily basis, to look for any unexpected changes to files on your server. This can help to identify any issues on your website quickly, allowing us to take immediate action.
Our hosted clients enjoy average website uptime of 99.9% or more (based on 2022 figures) and we backup each site to multiple data centres. In the extremely unlikely event of a hack, our Fully Managed Hosting includes full critical support to get your website up and running again.
Thorough Training
At Pooka & Co, we believe the success of any website relies on excellent training. With each new site we build, our Directors provide direct one-to-one training, and produce a unique series of bespoke training videos, always available inside your site’s WordPress dashboard.
As well as our bespoke videos, Pooka & Co also regularly update our unique library of WordPress, WooCommerce and CiviCRM training videos. As a fully managed hosting client, we’ll place these videos next to your bespoke videos, helping your team to understand everything from password creation, to the wider WordPress landscape.
Building and hosting your website with Pooka & Co will allow you and your organisation to get the most out of your online presence from day one. It will also ensure that re-training is incredibly simple when new staff come onboard, or when you simply haven’t done something in a while!
“Pooka & Co were highly efficient and well resourced to meet our demanding deadlines, innovative in their approach, and very dependable and honest. We now have a fantastic product and would recommend their services to anyone.”
Josie Bateman
Flood Toolkit
Bringing an Existing Site to Pooka & Co
Pooka & Co’s primary focus is designing, building and maintaining great sites for our clients. However we’re occasionally asked if we’ll host a site built by another developer. Our general answer to this is ‘yes’, but with a few (hopefully logical) caveats:
We need to be allowed to perform a thorough review of your site code before importing it to our servers. Typically an Administrator level account will be required for this, and generally your current hosts will be unaware that we’re performing a review of the site.
We need to agree that you’re happy with our recommendations and guideline costings for any code amendments and plugin changes, based on our review of your site.
If we see that significant work will need to happen to bring your site up to our base standards (such as replacing legacy site-builder tools with the WordPress Block Editor), or even a full redevelopment of your site, we’ll need to agree a timeframe for this work to begin happening, generally within a couple of years.
Depending on your specific requirements, we’ll provide cost estimates for all three stages above, and of course appreciate the need for confidentiality, discretion and professionalism in what can occasionally be a pressured situation.