Outsourcing your website support can mean a few different things:
- Outsourcing your uptime, monitoring and remediation
- Outsourcing your SEO and analytics
- Outsourcing your design and website maintenance
If you’re interested in either of the bottom two meanings, we’ve already hit a bump in the road: we don’t know nothin’ about anythin’ when it comes to design and marketing; however, we can point you in the direction of our agency partners.
For everyone else…
Outsourcing uptime monitoring and support
Why outsource?
There are a few reasons why people choose to outsource their uptime monitoring and support.
Your team can’t cover 24/7…
While monitoring your application 24/7 doesn’t present too great a difficulty, having a team in place that can actually respond does.
It’s all very well knowing the second your application goes dark, but if there’s no one there to do something about it, it doesn’t really make a difference.
Teams compensate for this challenge by a number of less-than-ideal workarounds. Being ‘on call,’ can mean waking up at the drop of a hat to jump on a ticket or simply staying at your post well into the black AMs.
These kinds of rotas lead to employee burnout – not to mention revenue-and-reputation-damaging outages being attended to by the recently dreaming.
…but theirs can
Hence, you outsource to a team with a global footprint.
Many website support outsourcing companies have support staff strategically spread throughout the world so that any tickets can be looked at by a person supported in a fully functional, day-lit version of their organisation and not a nominally online skeleton crew.
This ensures smooth delivery of support for mission-critical mishaps 24/7 and out of hours.
As applications grow more complex, supporting them requires a specialist…
A number of key technology trends mean supporting a website is more tricksy than it’s ever been.
As cloud technology’s gotten smarter, and able to deliver more, it’s blended with the application, so that what we have now are very complex interdependent distributed systems (or c.i.d.s for short; as in, who’s keeping an eye on the cids? They’re going to get distributed at this rate).
Serverless and container-based apps are much more difficult to observe, for example, meaning it requires someone with more-than-the-average bit of know-how to deliver support satisfactorily.
Likewise, more composable approaches to development have left people increasingly dependent on third parties for core functionality. The list goes on.
…which they are
Enter the support specialist. Website support teams often boast application, CMS, cloud and DevOps experts, not to mention a suite of monitoring tools.
The central point is they’re purpose-built to support modern websites and applications. With skills, training, culture and tech all pointed at this objective.
Why get the rest when you could get the best?
For the peace of mind an SLA can offer…
A good support team will be holdable to a good SLA.
Again, it’s all very well setting uptime goals for your internal teams. But you can’t actually dock their salaries if your app’s down for a few minutes longer than you all agreed was acceptable.
…because it’s enforceable
For a specialist support team, however, meeting an SLA is a professional and legal necessity, and thus their whole business is geared towards doing exactly that.
What to outsource
Touching on the more protect-y, don’t-break-y areas of outsourcing support, we find many outsourceable components:
Monitoring
Outsourced support teams may integrate their own dashboards with your in-house monitoring solutions or provide monitoring entirely as a service.
Reporting and communications
The first line of defence, outsourced incident reporting and comms may just mean the correct engineers and stakeholders gain a clearer picture of the situation when they need to.
Resolution
The meat and potatoes, incident resolution means the team will directly intervene in your cloud or application to fix whatever’s gone awry.
Elements of the stack
The above can be performed – by a good support team – across your entire stack, with a watchful eye and steady hand on your underlying cloud infrastructure, application layer and any third-party integrations.
Teams will also be able to assist DevOps initiatives by monitoring and supporting pipelines and deliver security as a service.
How we can help
Who is this faceless good team? Are they just some paragon dreamt up for the purpose of a quick explainer? No. The mask slips.
It was us the whole time. And we would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for the meddling commercial imperative to reveal and plug ourselves.
We’re Just After Midnight, the premier website support outsourcing team.
We’ve borne the weight of such giants as Ford, Volvo and Everton Football Club, guaranteeing more 9s in percentage uptime than a British emergency call.
But don’t let that put you off. We work with partners of all shapes and sizes to keep websites and mission-critical apps on track.
So, to speak to us about outsourcing your website support, just get in touch.
