Web Maintenance as a Service: Our clients

Our dedicated Global Maintenance Team works diligently with our clients to keep their sites updated, secure, and fresh. In this blog, we’ll outline three common maintenance practices we use to keep our clients happy and their sites running smooth. 

Quick Response Times

Regular maintenance can prevent many common issues, but even properly updated sites can have problems. And, when they inevitably do, clients need a quick response – that’s precisely where our team excels. Whether a site is down or clients need help editing content, we’re ready to help. 
 
We use the same channels of communication both internally and externally and this is one of the reasons we have such quick response times. All of our client conversations about projects take place in Slack, so clients can raise an issue at any time and get a quick reply from anybody on the team. This can mean we can take action immediately, whether it's by troubleshooting over chat, creating a ticket for support, or escalating the task for immediate action.

In all cases, we’re able to deliver swift and transparent solutions for our clients because we are able to communicate directly with them.

Backups

Accidents happen, and when they do we can help. In one recent situation, a client deleted a user and subsequently deleted all the content associated with that user as well. It wasn’t immediately clear what had happened, but the site’s performance was suffering. We jumped in to investigate and found the root cause. From there, it was only a matter of contacting amazee.io (our favourite hosting provider) to restore the old back-up on production. After that, everything came back to life and went back to normal. We were able to investigate and solve the client's issue in a transparent and timely manner.  

Audits

We have maintenance and support clients that come to us after building their sites with our Amazee Labs Development Team, as well as clients who hire us to take care of sites built elsewhere. Maintaining existing sites built by other agencies means the code may or may not be in great shape. Every time we onboard a new client, we audit their site. During this process, we check if the modules or core are hacked, patched or up to date. We also check the caching settings and any custom code. Once we’ve done this, and fixed potential issues, we fully onboard new clients into our systems and tools (Github, Lagoon, Jira, etc). 

Drupal updates (... and patch parties)

We help our clients understand the importance of frequently updating their sites. In most cases, updates are lightweight and come with instant benefits, like performance and security. Updating the core and modules that make up a site is a common task for our team. For clients that prefer to update their sites less frequently, these updates can be done periodically or in batches. But critical security updates are a different story. 

Every now and then, critical security updates are released for Drupal core or specific modules. These updates need to be pushed immediately because neglecting them can make a site vulnerable to hacking, a loss of data, or both. For critical security updates to be implemented quickly, the maintenance team holds patch parties. 

During a patch party, we get team members from all around the world to focus on making sure all our clients’ sites are secure. For some sites, we have automation scripts, for others, we need to do things manually. Either way, we get all hands on deck to monitor everything and keep our clients updated.

During these concerted efforts, it’s great to have a globally distributed team so we can work continuously to make sure every site is updated, functional, and secure. 

Important events

One of the benefits of keeping our client communication in Slack  –  it’s visible to everyone on the team. That way someone is always available to help and the client is able to monitor its progress.

For important events on certain sites (newsletters, leads exports, etc) we use Slack integration to make sure everything runs smoothly and everyone knows what’s happening and when. You can read more on the subject in this blog post.

With the right tools and our dedicated team of experts, we make sure our clients' sites stay secure and up to date. Stay tuned for more blog posts in this series. 

If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of keeping your website well maintained and ahead of the competition, drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you.