AscendryxHosting and support
Most software projects fail after launch, when the builder leaves and nobody knows how the thing works. We host what we build, so the people who wrote your system are the people keeping it running.
Hosting sounds like a commodity until the day it is not. A disk fills, a certificate expires, a process hangs at 2am, or a database connection leaks until everything stops. At that point what matters is not the price per month, it is whether somebody notices before your staff do, and whether the person who answers has seen your system before.
Because we host what we build, a shortcut taken during development becomes our problem in the middle of the night. That turns out to be a very effective incentive, and it is the main reason we do not separate building from running.
What is in the monthly service?
Our own servers
We own and run the hardware here in the Philippines, not a reseller account on a larger cloud. There is a main machine and a second one that copies every change as it happens and stays current to within a second, so losing a machine does not mean losing the week. It matters when a client or a regulator asks where your records are kept.
Backups on a second machine
The standby protects you against losing a machine. It does not protect you against a mistake, because a deletion copies across as fast as anything else. So every database is also dumped at 2:30am and again at 2:30pm, kept two weeks here and two months on the other machine. That copy only ever adds, so if the live dumps were lost or encrypted the older good ones survive.
Monitoring that reaches a person
Every five minutes a health check tests each application, the database, replication and disk space, and restarts anything that has stopped responding. If a check fails we get an email and a text message, and another when it recovers. The monitor runs outside the applications and holds its own credentials, so it can still reach us when the database itself is the thing that is down.
Security patching
Dependencies and the operating system kept current as part of the retainer, not quoted as a separate project each time something needs updating.
A person who answers
Support goes to the people who built the system. There is no first line reading from a script that has never seen your setup.
Ongoing improvements
Your system keeps getting the fixes and improvements we make across the platform, not only the ones you pay for directly.
Questions
What do people ask about hosting and support?
What is the response time?
It is set out in your service agreement rather than invented per incident, and it is deliberately different for a system being down and a question about a report. We would rather agree that in writing than leave it to how busy the week is.
Do you charge for every small change?
No. Ordinary maintenance, small corrections and configuration changes are part of the retainer. New features are quoted, because otherwise the retainer quietly becomes a development contract and one of us ends up resentful.
What if we want to leave?
You get an export of your data in a usable format. We will not hold your records hostage, and it is written into the agreement so you do not have to take our word for it.
Can you host something you did not build?
Sometimes. It depends on what it is built with and what condition it is in. We will look before we agree, because taking on an unknown system and then being blamed for its existing faults helps nobody.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
Send a short description of the problem rather than a feature list. If we are a fit, we will come back with an approach and a price. If we are not, we will say so.