Working with your IT department to improve your web hosting

Learn about some of the things Tibus does to make life easier for your IT people.

Posted on 27 February 2017 -
Tibus BY Tibus

For medium or enterprise businesses, web hosting shouldn’t be a click and buy purchasing decision. Your chosen web hosting service should help your organisation towards its business goals, but also complement the IT work that’s already going on in the business.

That’s why it is important that your web host works with your IT department to ensure a smooth transition to your new web hosting service and a hosting setup that works for you in the long-term.

Here are some of the things Tibus does to make life easier for your IT people:

Discuss your current hosting setup with the existing provider

When a business is changing its hosting supplier, the IT department can either find itself operating as a go-between or, worse, speaking on behalf of the old supplier. We will talk directly to the existing provider to find out what arrangements have been in place, what’s working well and what’s not. Those discussions will form the basis of a migration plan, which will agree with your IT people and implement when the time comes.

Research audience and usage

We will listen to what the IT department and other departments involved in the process have to say about the intended audience of your website or application. We will want to know the type and expected numbers of visitors, and how they will be using the website or application, so that we can tailor the hosting setup to meet demand.

Get to know the website or application

As far as some hosting providers are concerned, the thing that is going to be hosted is strictly your issue. That’s not the way we see it. Even if your website or application is still at the development stage, we want to know as much about it as possible so that - similarly to the audience and usage information - we can build a hosting infrastructure that is best suited to the requirements.

Design the technical platforms to agreed budgets

Though input is always welcome, we will alleviate responsibility for designing the required technical platforms away from your IT team. It is fairly rare for there to be a hosting specialist within an IT department, so it is not really fair to expect a prescriptive brief of the precise nature of the hosting setup. We think it makes more sense to gather information on how the app or website will work, who will use it and what budgets are in place, then present our recommendations on the design of the technical platforms.

Order your physical servers

If you’re opting for a service that requires new physical servers, we will order these on your behalf. With budget and specification having already been agreed, this just saves time for your in-house staff.

Build your platforms, release development and staging servers

We will put in place the hosting infrastructure you need right now, but also to test, tweak and update your website or app going forward.

System testing, load testing and penetration testing

We don’t believe in building a hosting infrastructure and handing it over to your organisation to make sure it works as it’s supposed to. We conduct a range of system, load and penetration testing to confirm the performance and security of your hosting setup. We will continue to perform testing once your new hosting setup is up and running.

IT security and governance

The security testing mentioned above is backed by our ISO 27001 certification for IT security and governance. That means the Information Security Management System we operate for all our customer and back-of-house systems meets the international standard for quality in our industry. The upshot is that your organisation has peace of mind over how your data is being stored - and your IT department does not have to worry about maintaining those standards in-house.  

99.999% availability and industry-leading SLAs

Perhaps the biggest problem for any IT department is when something breaks and the rest of the organisation points the finger, or at least wants it fixed immediately. Tibus servers have 99.999% uptime, backed by industry-leading service level agreements. That means it is less likely that you'll experience downtime and, in the rare event that you do, a plan is already in place to minimise disruption.

Engineers at the end of the phone

Customer support is available at the end of the phone, not via a laborious online ticketing system. Our premium support customers can call us 24/7 to talk to us. Our support lines are staffed by engineers who can make the changes you need on the spot, not call centre staff following a script. That makes for a less frustrating experience, but also makes us a useful sounding board for any IT department.

Learn more about working with Tibus

If it sounds like we'd work well with your IT team, find out about the different hosting services we provide.

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