Regardless of the technology used, a website is really just a collection of files, links and sometimes, records in a database. These files must be stored on a special kind of computer called a server, which is permanently connected to the vast network of interconnected computers called the world wide web. In theory, almost any computer can be used as a server, but for a single website it's not usually practical to invest in the complex hardware and software necessary to keep your website data safe and consistently available.

That's why most small and mid-market companies rely on a vendor to provide them with hosting services in exchange for a modest monthly hosting fee. At Brandsouth, we have taken the hosting model to the next logical level and added a feature that most of our clients find really useful.

We call it Maintenance Hosting™

Under a maintenance hosting plan, clients pay us a monthly fee to not only host their website on our servers, but we also provide regular monthly maintenance of their site. Here's how it works:

1. We build your website and save all the files to our servers. The servers are housed in a data warehouse in Dallas, TX where hundreds of thousands of other sites are hosted. The datacenter is protected from the elements and as far as is practical, from any outside intrusion. A staff of technicians monitors the datacenter 24/7.

2. We ask you to assign a member of your staff to be the "website coordinator" then around the same time every month this person receives an email message from your Brandsouth project manager to ask about any news, staff changes, updates, new features or anything else you might want to be changed or added to your website.

3. The project manager uses our website designers, online marketers, programmers or graphic design staff to make the necessary changes. Under our regular maintenance hosting plan, your site receives one full hour of attention every month. 

4. Even if you don't request any specific changes, the project manager will check your website logs, test search engine rankings, re-wording text to include specific keywords or phrases, replace some of the stock photos used on your site, or rotate META tags and header keywords. All these things can help to maintain or even improve your search engine rankings because automated search engine "robots" can identify sites that are updated regularly and often assign them higher rankings.

5. If you request changes that are likely to take more than one hour, your project manager will ask if you want to pay for the extra hourly resources, or just spread the changes over the appropriate number of monthly updates.   

In addition to the maintenance activities listed above, each month we backup all the files of your website and store them on 100% redundant hard drives at our Greenville, SC location. Even if a natural disaster hits Dallas, your website can be restored from our backup files within a day or so. Same for any sites that are hacked (despite the best security measures, it can happen). We can wipe all the files at the data center and restore the backup files, usually within hours. 

The cost of Maintenance Hosting is just $80/month.

Hosting your website on our server without the maintenance features, but including monthly backups is a very affordable $25/month.

All Brandsouth-hosted accounts include the ongoing cost of domain name registration for domains registered by Brandsouth.