Information for our customers using OxheyNet / Fasthosts hosting package wishing to upgrade to SSL (https) website
Fasthosts Website Hosting Upgrade to SSL & The General Data Protection Regulation
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will affect us all. There are things you can do that can safeguard your customers data. One includes making your website a secure website hosted via an SSL (https://) connection.
If your website is currently hosted with Fasthosts UK via OxheyNet, then you have the option to upgrade to a server offering SSL (https). If you were to require this upgrade, we offer the following service to make this happen.
You will require (as minimum requirement) Linux Clustered Hosting. If you already have this on your package, then the process is simply to select and activate SSL. If not, then you will require the following service or a complete transfer to another hosting service.
Changes required to have SSL certificate installed on your hosting package
This is where your website will go from http://www.abc.com to https://www.abc.com which is an encrypted secure connection, recommended for websites which transfer any personal or sensitive data. This could even be required to include payment pages and contact forms.
Due to the new data recommendations being implemented by GDPR later this year, we recommend transfer of your website hosting on to a new hosting platform where an SSL certificate can be installed.
To set up a dedicated SSL Certificate the domain must first be set up to use Linux Clustered Hosting operating system. If your current website uses either a Windows or Linux Server, then the website and emails will need to be moved to the Linux Clustered Hosting server.
For this transfer to take place, the following would be required:
- Full backup of your website data
- Full backup of your database data – this is where you have a database driven backend of the website, for instance with a Wordpress site
- Full back up of your emails (not carried out by ableSEO).
It is recommended that the customer should do this (as you may have set up custom mailbox folders installed on your computers etc). However, this backup can be done by ableSEO if required at additional cost.
Where you are using more than one email account (i.e. admin@abc.com and info@abc.com etc) then all email account messages from each account should be separately backed up onto computer. - Once all the data has been backed up, your hosting package will be deleted, and a new hosting package will commence with the ability of SSL.
IMPORTANT – Your current hosting package will be DELETED and then re-created with a new up to date clustered hosting package. - We will reinstall Wordpress (where applicable) then re-create/restore the website backup and database backups on to the new server.
- The SSL certificate will be issued and activated.
- We will test your website to make sure it functions as before.
- You may wish to take this opportunity to have your website itself updated – i.e. out of date plugins on a Wordpress site can cause security issues and should be maintained.
We offer a monthly update service of £60 per month to keep the website plugins and Wordpress Core up to date – recommended for security. - A Fasthosts Customer Control Panel will be activated so you manage some of your routine settings on your domain hosting personally, such as creating new additional email accounts and changing passwords.
- All previously existing email accounts will be re-created by ableSEO (just the mailboxes, not the data).
IMPORTANT – Your emails on the previous server will have been DELETED so they must have been copied / backed-up prior to this changeover taking place!
We recommend you copy your own email accounts, although we do offer this service for you.
Please note, new passwords will be allocated by default (as we do not know your existing email passwords!).
This means your email programs will not “send and receive” until the passwords match. Therefore, you have 2 options:
Either change the passwords back to your old ones or
Enter the new passwords into your all your email software (on PC, phone, iPad etc).
You will have the facility to change email account passwords via the Fasthosts Hosting Control Panel. - Your re-created mailboxes will be empty, so you will need to copy back / restore the messages you had backed up prior to the changeover. You would need to do this for all mailboxes.
Edit: As of March 2019 Fasthosts offer a migration service, which means the files are no longer manually copied across. However, full backups are required and recommended by Fasthosts, in the event their migration service fails.
Do My Hosting Fees Go Up?
(Prices as of January 2019) Domain and Hosting fees are not controlled by ableSEO and the following is provided as a guide:
The hosting charges should remain unchanged, as the clustered hosting package is offered as a free upgrade. However, you will have the additional hosting cost for the SSL certificate service (i.e. the https:).
- The cost of the SSL certificate is around £85 per year (although you will have to buy 2 years’ worth at £190) on top of your current hosting fee.
You should also bear in mind that your current web hosting may be running older legacy email mailboxes, which are no longer available on the upgraded clustered hosting (although the more recent 100MB Mail Lite mailboxes are unaffected). This means, as your hosting is being completely renewed, you may not be entitled to the legacy email mailboxes and will have to subscribe to a newer package as per below:
- Mail Lite (100MB storage and 10MB message size limit – Free
- Mail Extra (2GB storage and 15MB message size limit) – £25 per year
How much to carry out the work and change over to the new system?
We offer a complete service for transferring your website across, including backing up and restoring the website pages data and database data as well as deleting and re-creating the required mailboxes (mailboxes only – does not include email messages or folders).
- Domain Hosting upgrade service as described costs from £180, depending on the size of the web files and database(s) that need to be backed up and restored
- Cost of new Customer Control Panel – FREE (this allows you to log in and adjust your account settings)
How do I backup my email messages and folders
We do not routinely offer the backing up and restoring of email messages and folders. However, if you do require us to do this for you, that would be an extra cost.
- Email messages backup service is from £80 per email account
If you are doing it yourself, we strongly suggest you create a backup locally and then import it into the new empty mailbox that we will create for you.
If you need advice on mailbox message backup etc, have a look at these links:
Microsoft offer advice on backing up your emails using Outlook – Click here
Apple have advice on backing up and importing – Click Here
Fasthosts offer their own help page info on backing up of emails – Click Here
Will there be any downtime?
Simply, yes. There will be some downtime of your site as the transitions occur. To minimise disruption, this will be carried outside of office hours wherever possible.
What guarantees do I have regarding my data and the functionality of the website
As with all backups and data transitions, there is always a potential risk of data corruption and data loss.
ableSEO cannot fully guarantee your data will transition from one server to another without fault. If problems do arise, then we will take all reasonable steps to ensure the functionality of your website as soon as possible. There may be additional delays where your website remains offline while these adjustments are carried out.
What other steps can I take to ensure the security of my website?
We recommend subscribing to our ableSEO monthly Wordpress update plan. For just £60 per month we will maintain the plugins and functionality of your Wordpress website. It is highly recommended to keep plugins and the Wordpress core up to date for security reasons and updates are regularly released.
All websites designed on the Wordpress platform by ableSEO are given a 6 month free update service. After that, we recommend subscribing to our update service.
What about the data we back up pertaining to your business?
We understand the need to keep data secure. Your company data will need to be downloaded to be backed up and then restored.
We do not pass any data on to third parties without the express permission of the owner. By agreeing for ableSEO to undertake your server change and hosting package upgrade, you give permission to ableSEO to download your data and create a cloud storage backup of it where necessary.
This data will be kept for sufficient time to at least ensure your website is satisfactorily up and running and continually performing as before.
If you do not permit ableSEO access to, and permission to download, your data then we cannot perform the tasks in hand.