Last week I outlined Epicom’s managed hosting service and explained that a universal definition for “managed hosting” has not yet been defined and several other companies use it loosely. However, Epicom firmly defines its managed hosting from security to customer service and support.  We manage all software installed on the system, including PHP, Apache and MySQL.

About six months ago, a critical security flaw was found in PHP. We monitor security notices and blogs and were aware of the issue shortly after it was found and were able to address the issue on all of our servers quickly. Clients that are managing their own servers may never be aware of a bug, much less have patched their PHP software.

We are very proud of the performance that our hosting provides for SugarCRM. SugarCRM is a complex product and we have spent a lot of time tuning our servers to serve SugarCRM quickly. We love doing a before and after speed test when a new client switches to our hosting from another provider. It is usually a pretty dramatic performance boost.

I mentioned last week that we are currently on our “third gen” server design. We are constantly looking for new ways to make our servers run better or be more secure. Our “first gen” servers were awesome at the time, but we want to continually improve our server stack. The desire to improve keeps us motivated to stay on top of the latest in Linux technology.

We take security very seriously with our servers. That includes managing the firewall and going to great lengths to prevent unauthorized access to the system. We don’t allow unencrypted protocols to access the server at all. If someone asks for FTP access to the server, we won’t allow it because it is unencrypted. We don’t even allow password authentication on encrypted protocols, and instead require that public/private key’s be used for authentication.

Our servers are actively monitored for any problems such as reaching capacity on your hard drive. Epicom will notify you before a problem arises to ensure that you always have access to your SugarCRM system.

Another area that we take very seriously is backups. In fact we take it so seriously that it warrants an entire blog post on it’s own. Click Here to read more on backups.