Features

We desire to take on the technological burdens of running your website, so you can focus on your own goals. Therefore, we provide knowledgeable, quick, and friendly support to help you on your website. Many of our customers never have to log into website control panels or use FTP. You can always reach out to us when you have a question or you need something completed, such as an on-demand backup, a restore, an update to a plugin, a new email address (for sites we host), moving a site from staging to live, and more. You don’t have to use a special support system or find your password in order to contact us. Just reach out to us, and we’ll assist you.

We offer numerous methods to reach us, including a link right from your WordPress dashboard. We are also available via email, live chat, texting, and Facebook Messenger. If you’d like to call us, you may call and leave a message, and we’ll be happy to call you back as soon as possible.

Our standard business hours are Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm. We try to respond to support requests as quickly as possible, with the goal as no longer than 4 hours. If you have a concern after hours, you may contact us by using our contact form and choosing “urgent request;” you may also contact us via live chat, texting, Facebook messenger, or leave us a voicemail. We will be notified and will respond as quickly as possible, even on weekends and holidays. We understand there are times when an urgent response is needed, and we are happy to accommodate.

While our standard business hours are Monday – Friday, 9am – 5pm Eastern Time, we know urgent problems arise outside of standard business hours. Therefore, we provide numerous ways for you to contact us if you have an urgent request after hours, including:

• Our contact form, with “Urgent request” selected
• Live Chat
• Text
• Voicemail

When you contact us, please indicate it’s an urgent request, and we will respond as soon as possible, whether it’s after hours, on weekends, or even on holidays.

We include business grade email accounts with all of our hosting plans.* This includes:

• Robust webmail, supporting multiple identities, vacation responders, and threaded messages, available from any device and anywhere.
• The ability to upload and share files. This is a great way to send someone a large file that may not go through email.
• Spam and virus protection to keep your inbox clean.
• Free email migration, including setting up all of your accounts and migrating any email you have on another provider’s servers.
• 5GB of storage per user

* The number of accounts included depend on which plan you sign up for. You can purchase additional accounts on any plan for an additional $10/month for an additional 5 mailboxes.

We can work with you to determine a good use of development and staging sites for your purposes, and we can set up tools to sync content and code changes between the different stages of your website.

Development sites can be used when working on a new version of your website, as a construction area for ongoing development of new enhancements so changes don’t affect live sites, or even as a temporary site to test a new plugin or code change.

All development sites are password protected so no one can view them without a password. This protects the development sites from being indexed by search engines accidentally, keeps attackers from trying to target something that is in progress, and keeps anyone that you don’t want from seeing your new site before it’s ready.

We will even host a project’s development site for free before prior to the project starting, as long as you plan to host the site with us at launch. Just contact us to get a site set up for your new project.

We also include staging sites with all of our hosting plans. These are good as a place to make changes, review, and then push the changes live. We can work with you to not only set up the staging site, but also come up with a good way to push the changes live. Depending on your website features, such as e-commerce, content updates, etc. we can assist with the right strategy for where changes need to take place and how to make them live.

We can monitor your SEO ranking for keywords in a weekly or monthly report. You can let us know what search keywords you would like tracked, and we will monitor your ranking for those keywords weekly and send you a report to show your current rankings, how you compare to previous weeks, and your top competitors for those keywords. If you’re trying to improve your SEO rankings, this is a great way to monitor for changes.

We will gladly install new plugins and themes for you. Whether it’s a free plugin from the WordPress repository or a premium plugin you purchased and need installed, we will backup your website, install the plugin, and perform basic configuration (such as setting up an update key or setting a few options).

We include website performance enhancements to increase the speed of your website, including:

• Combining files (such as CSS and JS) and compressing them to reduce the number of website requests and speed up loading time
• Compressing and resizing existing images for smaller file sizes and faster loading time
• Automatically compressing and resizing images as they are uploaded
• Automatically converting images to the best format

Our Content Delivery Network (CDN) keeps a copy of all assets used by your website, such as images and static files (CSS, JS, etc.).  When someone visits your website, these assets are delivered to them from the nearest server, reducing loading time.

With our Advanced Website Caching option, the entire page content is also kept on the CDN, so that everything is loaded from the closest CDN location, without ever hitting your website directly. With this option, we will also set up a WordPress plugin that will clear the CDN’s copy of a webpage anytime you update it so that changes you make are immediately available.

A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is when many different devices attack your site at the same time so that your website is no longer available to anyone.  Our Cloud-based Web Application Firewall stops those attacks from even getting to your website, allowing valid users through without any delay.

We include a Content Delivery Network to speed up your website.  Normally, when someone visits your website, their computer has to connect to your web server, which could be across the world. The farther away it is, the slower the speed at which your website will load. A Content Delivery Network takes all the static resources of your website (such as images and static files) and keeps a copy in data centers around the world. When a user accesses one of those resources, it is delivered to them from a server close by without even accessing your main hosting server, which speeds up the page load time of your website. Additionally, we can configure your entire website to be delivered via the Content Delivery Network, greatly speeding up load times.

Statistics show that a site’s speed is one of the chief factors impacting the ability to retain site visitors. Caching alleviates the need for every page to be fully generated for every visit, allowing your visitors to enjoy substantially faster browsing speed. We configure full site page caching specific to the needs of your site, powered by Varnish. This site-specific tailoring ensures that you (and your visitors) get to enjoy all the performance benefits of caching, without sacrificing any of the functionality of your site.

Security is key for your website. For this reason, we include a Web Application Firewall (WAF) for every website we manage or host. This will help prevent hackers from breaking into your site, often to add malware or spam. Contrary to popular belief, hackers do not merely target large or popular websites. Gaining access to your website gives hackers the ability to use it to attack and infect other websites, so even if you have a relatively obscure site, they may still try to break in. The web is – well, a web – and hackers use this to their advantage, crossing from one site to another once they get inside.

Advanced Cloud Web Application Firewall

We include a Cloud-based Web Application Firewall that includes:

• A layer of protection to stop attacks before they even reach your website
• Rules to stop hackers who are trying to leverage software vulnerabilities on your website, even before the vulnerability is detected and patched
• A block for repeated attempts to guess your admin username and passwords (known as brute force attacks)
• The ability to block all users from specific countries from which attacks may be originating, but from which no valid visitors are originating
• The ability to add extra security to your WordPress login by requiring you to whitelist your IP address before logging in
• Prevention of DDoS attacks
• A Content Delivery Network (CDN) that delivers static content from your website to visitors from a close data center, speeding up your website

In addition to our automated tests that we run after we perform an update, we will go through each section of your site reviewing the pages and functionality.  If we find any problems during this review, we will resolve them or restore the site to the backup and work with you to get the problems resolved.

For any WordPress website we manage, our top priority is security, and this starts with software updates. The #1 reason websites get hacked or infected with malware is outdated software. Therefore, we monitor for vulnerable software on your website and perform prompt updates to keep your website secure.

At least once a week, we will review your website for any vulnerabilities in the WordPress core files, plugins, or themes.  If we see any vulnerabilities, we’ll perform a full backup of your website, and update the appropriate software.  We’ll then run automated tests to ensure the plugin did not cause any problems.  If any problems are detected, we will review and attempt to resolve them immediately.  If we cannot resolve them quickly, or the adverse impact to your website is significant, we will restore from our backup.  Depending on what we determine is causing the problem with the software update, we may create a temporary development site based on the backup and attempt the upgrade there in order to resolve any problems before pushing the update on your live site.  We will spend up to 1 hour to get an update working correctly.  If we are unable to resolve the problems in that period of time, we will make sure your site is working correctly, and we will contact you with options on how to handle the update.  Once the updates are complete, we will email you to let you know what has been updated and ask you to review the site as well.  If we noticed any problems with the update, even if we fixed them, we will include that as a note with your notification.

Since our main priority is security, we usually only upgrade vulnerable software.  However, we are happy to upgrade WordPress or any plugin or theme at any time upon request (at no additional cost).  We will still perform a full backup and the same post-upgrade testing when we perform these optional upgrades.

At the beginning of every month, we will email you a report with an update on the previous month’s activities, such as plugin updates completed and malware scans performed.

We want to help make running your own website an easy process. Our goal is to remove all your technology-related concerns, so you can focus on your website’s content. To facilitate this, we provide WordPress video tutorials in your WordPress dashboard for easy access to information about using WordPress. The videos cover a wide array of topics, including:

• The Dashboard
• Pages vs. Posts
• Adding New Pages
• Adding New Posts
• Editing Text
• Using Paragraphs
• Hyperlinks
• Lists
• Heading Styles
• Post Excerpts
• Set Featured Image
• Categories
• Using Tags
• Revisions
• Using Trash
• Restoring Posts
• Restoring Pages
• Video Embed Codes
• Embed Videos
• Creating Playlists
• The Media Library
• Adding Images from Media Library
• Adding Media
• Add Image from URL
• Uploading Images
• Editing Images
• The Image Editor
• Replace an Image
• Deleting Images
• Image Galleries
• The Toolbar
• The Admin Bar
• Quick Draft
• Changing your Password
• Managing Comments
• Navigation Menus
• Managing Widgets
• Create and Edit Users
• The Customizer
• Tools
• Settings
• Change Themes
• Install and Configure a Plugin
• Install a Theme

With any of our web hosting plans, we can handle any HTML or PHP/MySQL website. Unlike some hosts that are so specific that they only provide hosting for WordPress and/or Drupal, we can host all of your websites. For example, if you have a WordPress sales site, a custom PHP application, and a Angular web app, you don’t need to find separate web hosts – we can handle it all for you. And for each site, we will provide a web application firewall and malware scanning to make sure it stays safe.

Find out about problems before your customers do!

Included in all of our plans is 24/7 uptime monitoring. Every minute, our automated systems check your website from multiple locations across the world. If our systems are not able to access your site, you will get a notification so you can contact your web host to investigate the problem. If we host your website, we will also receive the notification and will immediately check into it to make sure your website is running smoothly.

While the Web Application Firewall tries to prevent an attack, it’s important to also regularly scan the website to ensure your website does not contain any malware.

On any site we manage or host, we provide an advanced malware monitoring that daily scans all files in your website to detect for any potential malware. If any malware is detected, we are notified of the problem and will investigate, so that you do not have to try to figure out what is going on.  If we determine that there is a problem, we will do a backup of your site and resolve the problem. Additionally, we will investigate how the problem occurred to make sure we solve the problem at its root.  We will always keep you informed of what happened and how we resolved it.

Security is key for your website. For this reason, we include a Web Application Firewall (WAF) for every website we manage or host. This will help prevent hackers from breaking into your site, often to add malware or spam. Contrary to popular belief, hackers do not merely target large or popular websites. Gaining access to your website gives hackers the ability to use it to attack and infect other websites, so even if you have a relatively obscure site, they may still try to break in. The web is – well, a web – and hackers use this to their advantage, crossing from one site to another once they get inside.

Basic WordPress Web Application Firewall

For any WordPress site we host or manage, we include a premium Web Application Firewall designed specifically for WordPress. This software includes:

• Rules to stop hackers who are trying to leverage software vulnerabilities on your website, even before the vulnerability is detected and patched
• A block for repeated attempts to guess your admin username and passwords (known as brute force attacks)
• The ability to block all users from specific countries from which attacks may be originating, but from which no valid visitors are originating
• The ability to add extra security to your WordPress login by requiring that you enter a code sent to your cell phone in order to login
• Advanced SPAM filter to reduce the amount of SPAM comments generated on your website

Automatic Backups

Having a backup of your website is important for many reasons, including:

• Rolling back when an upgrade causes problem
• Cleaning up malware or spam infections on the site
• Undoing mistakes by staff or developers
• Migrating to a new hosting environment

Many low-end web hosts do not perform backups, and of those that do, most create backups only for their own purposes. They often do not provide you a means to restore, and many times they only keep 1 version of the backup.  It’s important to have daily backups for at least 30 days (preferably longer), so that if a problem is located, you can restore back to a version that predates the issue – which could be several days, weeks, or even months old.

Even if your web host keeps 30+ days of backups that you can use, having an external source for backups is important. Sometimes, a problem can effect the hosting provider that can cause them to lose their backups – especially since many low-end hosting providers don’t replicate their backups or utilize multiple data centers.

With a Sentree Hosting plan, we perform an automated backup every day and keep a full 90 days of backups. Even for our web hosting clients, we use a 3rd party backup solution that is completely separate from our infrastructure, and allows for easy migrations to a new host when desired.

On Demand Backups

We automatically backup your website every day, but sometimes you need an additional backup at a specific point in time – such as before a large website update.  You may make an emergency request, and we will perform an on-demand backup for you right away. Additionally, if you would like the ability to make your own on-demand backups, we are happy to provide you access.

Restoring Backups

The key to a backup is the ability to restore when needed.  When you need a backup restored, you may make an emergency request, which we will handle as a top priority.  There are many things to consider when handling and restoring backups, and we provide our expertise and advice, taking care of the steps necessary to reduce downtime, avoid data loss (a common side-effect of restoring a backup) and ensure a smooth process.

Our restore process always includes backing up the site we’re about to restore over and then performing the restore.  This way we can also revert back to the version right before the restore, in case it’s discovered that important data was written over. We can also restore a backup to a temporary environment, allowing us to incrementally restore individual components of the backup to your live environment – avoiding any data loss or downtime.

As with on-demand backups, we can also give you access to an easy-to-use tool that lets you restore on demand. However, most of our clients opt to have us perform restores, due to the potential risks or data loss, downtime, or other issues.

Sentree leverages Upcloud’s robust infrastructure, boasting virtually 100% uptime, to host your website. In addition, unlike typical shared hosting services, we host only a very small number of sites on each server, resulting in peak performance. Combined with our proactive monitoring, white-glove support, and powerful performance and optimization tools, the result is top-tier speed and reliability that you can count on.

It is becoming increasingly important to serve your website via HTTPS, which is a secure connection between your website and your visitors. Browsers are starting to warn you if you visit a site without HTTPS and submit any information, and these warnings are becoming more severe to notify users of the site’s insecurity. Additionally, Google is starting to give increased rankings to sites with HTTPS. And most importantly, it keeps you, your website, and your visitors more secure by not allowing a malicious person to interfere with the communications to your website.

All of our hosting plans include HTTPS. We will set up and renew the HTTPS certificates for you and will ensure your website runs well via HTTPS. This usually includes ensuring all references on your site to external resources are via HTTPS rather than HTTP.

All of our hosting plans are managed hosting plans, and we handle all of the following for your website:

• Server security, with regular updates and maintenance
• A clustered hosting environment to prevent downtime, even during regular maintenance and unexpected server outages
• Configuration of malware scanning and a Web Application Firewall with specific settings for your website
• Monitoring of alerts from malware scans, uptime monitoring, and the Web Application Firewall and resolving any problems found
• Monitoring of email failures to help detect problems and ensure the highest level of deliverability
• Secure, off-site daily backups, kept for 90 days
• Ability to request a change (such as adding an email account or setting up a development site) via one of our numerous support methods without having to use a control panel

We will migrate your website, email, and domain registration to our hosting for no charge. Once you provide us access to your current web hosting account, we will handle the entire process. You won’t need to follow any steps for an “automated migration” that requires you to do the work. We’ll do it for you, and we’ll keep you informed of the progress.

Here’s a high level overview of our migration process:

1. We analyze your current hosting infrastructure, including where your website is hosted, where your email is hosted, where your DNS is hosted, and where your domain is registered.
2. We analyze your current website infrastructure to determine the best way to perform the migration.
3. We discuss with you our findings and dialogue about what services you wish to move to us.
4. We come up with a specific plan of action for your website migration in order to migrate the services you want us to handle with no website downtime.
5. We perform the migration process based on our agreed upon plan.

You won’t have to figure anything out, as we’ll do all the research and let you know if there’s anything we need from you, such as account access or for you to confirm any transfers.