What is Harbor Care?

This page lists all of the services and features included in Harbor Care. In summary, Harbor Care is Premium WordPress Hosting and Management costing $67 per month. This page details what is included, and not included in Harbor Care.

Local Support

We’re a small, highly dedicated, uniquely skilled team, and we pride ourselves on providing great customer service. We serve local businesses, schools, city governments, chambers of commerce, and a few national brands. Our staff is mainly located in Muskegon, Michigan.

Plugins, Theme, & WordPress Updates

Failing to make software updates can leave your website open to security threats which can easily be spotted by websites like hacker target.

We take care of updates for Harbor Care customers, checking and completing updates every two weeks. 

Why would a hacker target your website? To launch attacks from your site, to host malicious code, or to send mass spam emails.

Plugin Updates

Plugins are applications that can be added to extend and enhance the functionality of your WordPress website. Periodically plugin creators will release updates to fix problems and resolve security vulnerabilities. Keeping your plugins updated regularly ensures you have a safe and well-functioning website.

When you host your website with WP Harbor, we update your plugins for you twice a month. This makes sure that your website is running the latest version of your plugins and is fighting security threats properly.

Starting with quality plugins is important too. There are tens of thousands of plugins available for WordPress. However, not all of them receive regular updates or have responsive support. On top of updating your plugins for you, we offer a variety of free premium plugins as part of our service!

Theme Updates

Themes are what help give your website its appearance and base functionality. Similar to plugins, theme updates occur periodically and are required to keep your site running securely. Failing to make available updates can cause conflicts and leave your site open to hackers and other security threats. For this reason, we update themes and plugins twice a month as part of our service to you!

WordPress Updates

WordPress is the Content Management System (CMS) that most websites are built on today. Every now and then, this system needs to be updated in order to resolve security vulnerabilities and also to keep up with changes to the underlying code base (PHP).

Essential SEO

We want to make sure our customers are set up for success! When you have Harbor Care, we’ll provide these essential SEO best practices:

  • Install Google Analytics
  • Set up Google Search Console
  • Submit an XML sitemap to Google
  • Speed Optimization
  • Ensure your site has an SSL certificate enabled

Install Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful free tool that is overlooked sometimes by people that need a website but do not have the expertise or time to dive this deep.  And while you may not feel you need some of the data that Google Analytics collects, you may in the future.  Having experts set this up for you now allows the data to mature over time and provide sometimes shocking details to help you optimize your website or create marketing strategies based on facts.

Google Analytics provides data such as:

  • What people do when on your website
  • How they arrived on your site
  • What page they left your site from
  • How long they spent on your site

There’s a lot more to Google Analytics, but the bottom line is that any website today should have this added and we set it up on your site correctly as part of our service to you!

Set up Google Search Console

Google Search Console goes hand-in-hand with Google Analytics.  It is another powerful free tool that should be running in the background collecting data on your website.  Search Console tells us a lot about how people arrive on your site and gives insight into what is prompting people to find you.  This is another tool any website needs set up correctly to ensure useful data is available when it is needed.

Google Search Console Shows:

  • What keywords visitors are using to find your site
  • Your average rank for those keywords
  • The number of times your site appears in search results
  • How often links to your site are clicked

When you host your website with WP Harbor, we take care of setting up Google Search Console for you and make sure it is running correctly in the background for when you need it!

Submit an XML sitemap to Google

A sitemap is a file that provides information about pages, videos, and other files on your website.  It helps search engines like Google better understand your website, and the relationship between its pages, and helps Google Bots to crawl and index your website.

Speed Optimization

Probably one of the least debated facts in the web development sphere is that speed is important.  Especially in today’s world of lightning-fast internet, a slow-loading page may be the first and only thing someone notices about your website.

Research has shown that it influences everything from:

  • Bounce rates
  • User satisfaction
  • Conversions
  • Revenue
  • And much more

If your site is slow, visitors will not stick around. And because visitors care about speed, search engines factor load speed into search ranking results. In other words, if your site loads slowly, it shows up lower in Google search results.

Server Level Caching

We use a special web server called Litespeed, which uses server-level caching integrated specifically.

Website Caching

WP Rocket is a premium WordPress plugin designed to speed up your website in a variety of ways including Database Optimization, Minification of HTML, CSS, and Javascript files, deferred loading, and more. We provide and install WP Rocket free of charge on each site we host.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

We optionally set up our clients with Cloudflare, the best Content Delivery Network (CDN) available.

A CDN stores copies of your site on servers around the world. This shortens the distance between the user and your website, making it load a bit faster. A CDN also helps with load balancing in the event of a spike in traffic because the CDN will “cushion the blow” on server resources. 

If you’re thinking “I just have a local business, I don’t need to worry about people all over the world using my website.” That might be true. However, Google factors site load time into account when ranking a website in local search results, and we want to do everything we can to give our clients an advantage over their competitors.

Enable SSL Certificate

Google has been using the presence of an SSL certificate as a ranking factor since 2014. As stated on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog: “we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal.” In other words, between two sites that are otherwise equal, the one with the secure connection (SSL certificate) is going to rank higher than the one without.

Advanced SEO

For an additional fee, customers who want to rank locally for specific keywords can sign up for our Standard SEO services.

Premium Plugins

Harbor Care customers gain access to a suite of premium plugins which would cost over $1,000 if purchased individually.

The plugins we offer are commonly used by small businesses and organizations. Normally each website would need to purchase its own individual license for each plugin. But we’ve gone ahead and purchased developer licensing for these plugins which we share with our customers at no additional cost to them. 

These plugins allow our customers to do things like:

  • Accept credit cards payments
  • Create Online Forms, Employment Applications, and Contracts with Electronic Signatures
  • Integrate with social media like Facebook and Instagram
  • A/B Split test lead capture forms
  • Optimize Website Speed
  • And more

Here is the full list of Plugins and their cost if purchased separately. All of these plugins are included with Harbor Care at no additional cost.

  • Gravity Forms – $259
  • WP Rocket – $59
  • Divi Theme – $89
  • Divi Supreme Pro – $79
  • Divi Carousel – $29
  • Advanced Custom Fields Pro – $49
  • Smash Balloon Facebook Integration – $189
  • Smash Balloon Instagram Integration – $198
  • WP Simple Pay – $149
  • Akismet – $120
  • Monarch – $89
  • Bloom – $89
  • Thrive Leads – $299
  • WP All Import – $99
  • WP All Export – $99
  • Hummingbird Pro – $60
  • Smush Pro – $60
  • Hustle Pro – $60
  • Forminator Pro – $60

Status Monitoring

Most web hosting companies consider it their job to provide hosting space, and that’s it. As long as the server is up and running, the typical web host considers their job done. Whether your actual website is up and running properly is not their job. 

We think differently because we provide Premium Managed Hosting AND WordPress Management. 

If your website goes down, we want to be the FIRST to know about it, so we actively monitor your website to make sure it’s up and running. If it goes down. We get to work investigating and in most cases, fixing it.

Spam Prevention

We’ve found that Akismet is the BEST tool for stopping spam comments and form submissions. Akismet is a premium plugin ($120/year) included free to Harbor Care customers at no additional cost. 

Akismet uses crowd-sourced data and algorithms to fight spam. Akismet operates by combining information about spam submissions captured on all participating sites.

Each time someone makes a submission on a website, Akismet checks the submission against all the comments in the Akismet database. If it matches a spam profile, it’s automatically deleted. 

If a submission gets through and a user manually marks it as spam, the submission is added to the database so the pool of spam submissions widens, making Akismet increasingly effective over time.

Spam flags could be a consistent message, email, IP Address, or other indicators that are identifiable across all websites in the Akismet network. 

We install Akismet and configure it to protect your site against spam comments and spam web form submissions.

Visitor Analytics

We check for Google Analytics and Google Search Console and set them up if necessary.

Google Analytics

We set up your website with Google Analytics and Google Search console. This is not only important data to collect, but connecting your website to Search Console (and submitting a site map, which we’ll also take care of for you) falls under Search Engine Optimization best practices.

Google Analytics is a powerful free tool that is sometimes overlooked by people that need a website but do not have the expertise or time to dive in too deep.  And while you may not feel you need some of the data that Google Analytics collects today, you may in the future.  

Having experts set this up for you now allows the data to mature over time and provide sometimes shocking details to help you optimize your website or create marketing strategies based on facts instead of feelings.

Google Analytics provides data such as:

  • What people do when on your website
  • How they arrived on your site
  • What page they left your site from
  • How long they spent on your site

There’s a lot more to Google Analytics, but the bottom line is that any website today should have this added and we set it up on your site correctly as part of our service to you!

Google Search Console

Google Search Console goes hand-in-hand with Google Analytics.  It is another powerful free tool that should be running in the background collecting data on your website.  Search Console tells us a lot about how people arrive on your site and gives insight into what is prompting people to find you.  This is a free tool every website needs to set up correctly to ensure useful data is available when it is needed.

Google Search Console Shows:

  • What keywords visitors are using to find your site
  • Your average rank for those keywords
  • The number of times your site appears in search results
  • How often links to your site are clicked

When you host your website with WP Harbor, we take care of setting up Google Search Console for you and make sure it is running correctly in the background, ready for when you need it!

Optimized For Speed

Site speed and load time factor into everything from search engine optimization, to bounce rate, and conversions. We love to think about site speed so our customers don’t have to, and there’s a LOT that goes into it.

Sever Level Optimization

A fast website starts with high-quality Web Hosting. Our dedicated servers are built for speed from the ground up, and we limit the number of sites allowed per server to ensure there are always plenty of resources available to process user requests as quickly as possible.

Server Details

  • Processor: Intel Xeon E3-1230 v6 Quad-Core
  • RAM: 32GB DDR4 SDRAM
  • HD1: +240 GB SSD (Primary Drive – RAID 10)
  • HD2: 2TB SATA HDD (Backup Drive)

RAID 10 Configuration

Raid 10 is a method of storing information on hard disks for greater protection and performance. RAID 10 utilizes both Mirroring and Striping and requires four physical hard drives and a disk controller that supports RAID.

Mirroring (RAID 1) is writing data to two or more hard drives at the same time – if one disk fails, the mirror image preserves the data from the failed disk. 

Striping (RAID 0) breaks data into “chunks” that are written in succession to different drives making access faster because data can be read simultaneously.

Combining these two storage methods RAID 10 (or 1+0) offers a data storage solution that is fast and resilient at the same time.

Litespeed Web Server

Web Server software is installed on a server to process incoming HTTP requests and responses. The most popular web servers are Apache (1995), Nginx (2004), and Litespeed (2015). Numerous speed tests confirm Litespeed Web Server as the fastest web server available today.

During a load stress test by WP Speed Matters, 10,000 requests per second were sent over a 1 minute period. 50% of the requests were timed out by Nginx, whereas Litespeed only timed out 6%. Meanwhile, The average response time for Nginx was 5.7 seconds while Litespeed was only 2.8 seconds.

Load testing performed by Chemicloud sent 2,000 requests with up to 100 requests running concurrently against three duplicate server setups running Apache, LiteSpeed, and Nginx.

LiteSpeed outperformed in all aspects, including response time, requests per second, and transfer rate. Graphs of the results:

Website Caching – Sever Level Intgration

One of the best benefits of using Litespeed is LSCache, a WordPress plugin that’s built specifically to integrate with Litespeed’s server-level caching. LSCache also offers a variety of WordPress optimization features such as HTML, CSS, and JS file minification, image optimization, and more. 

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

We optionally set up our clients with Cloudflare, the best Content Delivery Network (CDN) available.

A CDN stores copies of your site on servers around the world. This shortens the distance between the user and your website, making it load a bit faster. A CDN also helps with load balancing in the event of a traffic spike.

If you’re thinking “I just have a local business, I don’t need to worry about people all over the world using my website.” That might be true. However, Google takes site load time into account when ranking a website in local search results, and a CDN impacts site load time. We want to do everything we can to give our clients an advantage over their competitors, so we recommend the use of CDN.

Custom Speed Optimization

If you need even more speed offer custom speed optimization for an additional fee.

Fully Managed Hosting

We take care of everything hosting-related. If you’re a non-technical business owner or organization director who never wants to think about web hosting again, then Harbor Care is for you. Managed hosting includes:

  • Disk usage
  • Bandwidth usage
  • PHP.ini settings
  • PHP version
  • Server error resolution

Dual Backups

We make sure your important data is safe and secure. We back up your website nightly and weekly, with each backup type being stored on separate cloud servers for redundancy. At any given point, we have up to 35 copies of your site! If you need us to roll your site back to a different version, just reach out to customer support.

Backup 1: Nightly, stored on the “nightly” remote cloud server, saved for 30 days

Backup 2: Weekly, stored on the “weekly” remote cloud server, saved for 30 days

Backup 3: Bi-weekly stored locally on the server but separate from the main site account.

What data is backed up?

We back up everything in your WordPress folder, including all uploaded files (/wp-content/uploads) as well as the site database.

Where do you store backups?

We utilize 3rd party cloud backup services that store backups on a completely different set of servers from your live site.

Can I have a zip file backup of my site?

Yes absolutely! Just send us an email or give us a call and we will provide you with a link to download a backup.

How do I restore a backup?

Just send us an email or give us a call and we can restore a backup for you.

SSL Certificates

An SSL certificate creates an encrypted connection between your website and the user who is accessing it. In the past, only websites processing credit card information were required to have an SSL certificate, and technically, that’s still the case.

However, Google has been pushing hard for all websites to have an SSL certificate, and in 2014 they announced they would be giving preference in search results to websites with an SSL installed.

Next, in 2017 Google announced they would be flagging websites without an SSL as “Not Secure” and Firefox followed suit.

We install an SSL certificate and verify it is working correctly on all websites that we manage. Learn more about how we protect your website here.

Website Security

Security is one of the most important things we handle for our clients. We consider keeping your site safe our responsibility. 

If your site is hacked on our watch our team of WordPress experts will quickly and carefully remove the malware for you. Free of charge. No questions asked.

Security Included with Harbor Care:

Ongoing WordPress Security

  • Check that the site is running on the recommended version of PHP
  • Check that WordPress is running on the latest version
  • Check that all plugins have been updated
  • Check that all themes have been updated
  • Check for extraneous plugins and remove them if found
  • Check for extraneous themes and remove them if found
  • Check for spam comments and remove them if found
  • Active monitoring/scanning of all code changes in realtime (light malware scan)
  • Daily deep scans for malware using off-server resources to avoid impacting site performance (algorithmic check)
  • Web Application Firewall implementation
  • Brute force login protection
  • Intelligent bot protection
  • Activity logging

One-Time WordPress Security Settings

  • Restrict access to files and directories (wp-config file to 600, for other files to 644, and for directories to 755.)
  • Configure security keys
  • Block unauthorized access to xmlrpc.php
  • Block directory browsing
  • Forbid execution of PHP scripts in the wp-includes directory
  • Forbid execution of PHP scripts in the wp-content/uploads directory
  • Block unauthorized access to wp-config.php
  • Disable scripts concatenation in the WordPress admin panel
  • Disable pingbacks
  • Disable PHP execution in cache directories
  • Disable file editing in WordPress Dashboard
  • Change the default database table prefix
  • Block access to sensitive files (for example, log files, shell scripts, and other executables)
  • Block access to .htaccess and .htpasswd
  • Block author scans
  • Change the default administrator’s username

Free Malware Removal

We consider keeping your site safe our responsibility. If your site is hacked on our watch our incredible team of WordPress experts will quickly and carefully remove the malware for you. 

What’s Not Included

Malware removal only covers the removal of the malware. If malware was added through a compromised password or an easily updated plugin, we will resolve the security issue and remove the malware for free.

However, sometimes malware is injected through vulnerable plugins, a vulnerable theme, an outdated version of WordPress, outdated PHP, or other issues.

Development work to make it compatible with security updates, or development work to replace front-end functionality previously provided by a vulnerable plugin is not included with free malware removal. 

24/7 Emergency Support

Our regular office hours are Monday-Friday, 9-5 pm, EST. While we are not available to answer phone calls or emails outside of those hours, we recognize that your website is mission-critical and we monitor it by sending a ping every 60 seconds. If your website fails to respond, our team is alerted and we go to work restoring it. Our server admin team is online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 

Site Migration

We’ll take care of everything related to moving your site to our Harbor Care! After you sign up, you’ll complete a short onboarding form and your Account Manager will take care of everything from there! We’ll migrate your site and even take care of the DNS updates for you!

Custom Code (additional fee)

How is this a benefit? Well, let’s just say that not all web developers are created equal, and ours are really good. How good? Good enough that we have to limit access to Harbor Care customers only.