CHRIS: A lot of times there will be major plateaus of growth and you'll want to be able to accommodate those in a really low-friction way. Most of our clients like to take advantage of the Cloud. Quite a few of them still have on-premise and dedicated environments that are virtualized, of course, but they're physically on site. There are a lot of different options for hosting.
Ultimately, the question here is going to be what exactly is the plan and who is going to manage it and take care of it? Some nuances for you to consider are going to be day to day with the hosting, who is actually going to be fixing issues if they occur, who's going to be monitoring and on the hook so that there's a ping every minute, and every day there's a report on the performance of the site and someone's operating off of that. Depending on the level of traffic that you have on your marketplace website, you may monitor more often than that. And so who's going to be managing and take care of this?
Then there's a whole detailed list of topics around security. I won't go into extreme detail; suffice to say that consistently is continually becoming more and more of a pattern that you're going to want to invest in the security side of things, and you'll be required to in order to work with payment processors and different integrations that you'll typically need to function in the marketplace business.
There's certain levels of security that you'll have to meet and this is going to continue to increase. So we encourage clients to just adopt, and most of our clients do, adopt the thought process of embracing security as a process that you're going to work with. So how often are you going to be making security patches and updates to your infrastructure and your hosting?
All of this is quite interesting and fun for me. I don't want to bore everyone, though, with detail. There are a lot of nuances we can go into and we have videos that talk about that. But really, this should be part of your overall plan and think about the fact that these changes, whenever you are doing security patches, the monitoring and the ongoing support, this is going to have a cost impact. And it is a logistical aspect that's absolutely critical.
Is it necessarily the most complicated part? Absolutely not. I mean, this should be a pretty routine part of the process for you, and whoever you're working with should be able to offer some really nice solutions for this. So it should be pretty turnkey, but it's still critical that you get this plan in place for making sure that you're maintaining and upgrading things so that five years down the road you're not dealing with something that's never been updated for five years. That could cost you a lot and you could have to redo everything five years from now because technology has passed you by.
RON: Good point. I remember, it's been a number of years, but the city of San Antonio came to us and they had 270 websites and hired us to put their five-year plan together, do a complete audit of all 270 sites, document every site—where they are, what patches, what modules, what's missing? What needs to be done to make them perfect?
Then put the five-year plan together for security and performance for all 270 sites. And I don't remember how many hundreds of pages, but I think if I remember, it was like a three-and-a-half, four-month project for you and the security and infrastructure team to work on that project and put that together. You remember that one?
CHRIS: Oh, yeah. And really, there's a spectrum there and that's a really great example of how detailed it can get. And that's really—the big thing here is that you should see this as something that you increasingly invest in as you continue to get more traffic and more exposure to risk. This is going to be an area that you'll want to continue to monitor and invest in and partner with a team like Clarity that can really help you to understand and adjust and tune this based on your specific eCommerce business.