May 1, 2019 Media Temple Updates

How to Start (and Finish) Projects at Media Temple

Media Temple is lucky to have customers like you who are always making and creating. And you’re looking for a hosting partner that can help you keep pace with your inspiration, innovation, and the demands of a growing business.

The feedback we’ve heard from our customers has been loud and clear: You want Media Temple to streamline your new project workflow by taking infrastructure and operations off your plate so you can focus on your work and your clients.

Fortunately, whether it’s your first day at Media Temple, or your 100th project, we offer several options to help you start, and finish, a successful project.

Managed Services from Advanced Support

If you’ve worked around technology for a while, you probably know that some of the problems you have to solve today are a result of decisions made in the past. To help minimize as many preventable issues down the road, many of our customers are looking for Media Temple to be an extension of their team, providing expertise and experience when selecting, deploying, optimizing, and managing the infrastructure that powers their digital presence.

While all customers receive Customer Support from Media Temple, Advanced Support is our elite team of system administrators that are hands-on with your more challenging technical problems. To adapt to the needs of our individual customers, Advanced Support is available on either an “as needed” basis or “always on” through a subscription.

Advanced Support can customize your server environment for a specific type of workload, optimize your database, and even migrate sites from outside Media Temple to one of our environments. And once your site or application is up and running, they can monitor, respond to, and resolve a number of infrastructure issues.

On top of the technical work they can perform on your environment, Advanced Support is also available to talk through problems that are outside the basic scope of Customer Support and provide some insight and direction on what your best course of action might be.

SSL, Security, and SEO

Security has always been important, but today the implications of not having the most secure environment are bigger than ever.

According to  NetMarketShare, Google Chrome is still the most popular browser on the internet with over 65% share. Starting with Chrome 68, released in July of 2018, sites that do not use an SSL are labeled as “Not secure”. This can influence your visitors’ confidence in your site and can also negatively influence your page rankings. An analysis of 1 million Google search results showed that “HTTPS had a reasonably strong correlation with first page Google rankings”, according to Banklinko.

Our customers know that an SSL is important, but some of the feedback we have received indicates that some customers are not sure how to properly install and test an SSL before going live with a new site. We’ve created a guide on the SSL process from start to finish if you want to do it yourself. Also, if an SSL is purchased through Media Temple, we can install the SSL certificate for you.

We also offer a number of other services once your site is live to help you maintain a safe and secure environment, such as malware scanning and removal.

Migrations

While it’s great to start a new site or application from the first line of code to the final commit, that’s not always the case. A lot of our customers inherit projects that are already in production, and they need help absorbing legacy code into their digital portfolio at Media Temple.

Moving a production site is never easy, and the possibilities for mishaps are many. To add to the anxiety that goes along with migrations, the financial impact to you or your client’s business can be significant if something goes wrong.

Media Temple’s focus on operationalizing your ideas includes our ability to move sites from their existing platform, even those outside of our data centers, onto one of our platforms. This migration also includes a basic test to ensure the site is still functional after the migration. And if DNS is hosted with Media Temple, our Advanced Support team can assist you with updating all of your DNS records.

Taking Control of the Control Panel

Most of our DVs come with a control panel that allows you to perform basic administration of your server. While this is a big convenience, some of our customers are not always familiar with the control panel and don’t have the time to figure things out when trying to launch a new project on time and under budget.

If you run into issues using one of the control panels installed on Media Temple platforms, we can provide a quick walk through and tutorial that addresses the features and functions you’ll use the most.

If your needs expand, let us know, and we can keep showing you new ways to take control of your own server environment.

What else can we do?

The internet has sped up the pace of business, and we want to help you stay ahead of the game.  If there is anything else Media Temple can do to help you and your team go from idea to implementation in record time, reach out to us!

The feedback we’ve received, and hope to continue to receive, is vital to our goal of building a suite of products and services that are tailored to our customers needs.

About the Author Joseph Palumbo is consumed with how technology influences our daily lives. Formerly of Apple, Rackspace and Cisco, as well as a number of startups, Joseph has spent half of his career helping customers make sense of new technology and the other half learning from customers how to build new technologies that solve real-world problems. More by this Author