We use RimuHosting to provide hardware that runs our web applications. They provide a great platform that is reliable and are highly responsive. What Mountain River provides is:
- Setup and tuning of the hosting platform. We put the applications onto the provided raw application and configure them optimally.
- Install and manage applications. We have a highly polished deployment process that supports tracking code through developer testing, user testing and to live.
- Monitor applications. We like to find out that something is wrong with an application before anybody else sees it.
- Regular, scheduled upgrades to the operating system, hosting platform and application platform.
- Scripted tools to streamline the creation of websites.
Our long experience running these platforms and control over them is an important part of our ability to be streamlined and efficient.
All our systems are run on linux and apache or Nginx.
Web Server Configuration
Every site is also set up with www.mydomain.com as the main domain address. People don't have to type the www and it is hidden on phones so don't panic about the extra 3 chaaracters and a dot too much . This is the same as google.com or microsoft.com or facebook.com.The technical reasons are:
1. convention e.g. google.com, microsoft.com, facebook.com. You probably have to redirect to https:// as well for security. Some programs will auto-complete or auto link things with www in it. People expect it to exist, so you need to have it anyway.
2. Flexibility. You can point your mail server to a different server than the web server anyway. But if you host outside your main corporate data centre then you need to create a connection from the corporate data centre or redirect to the new data centre. Having www can mean that this is a permanent redirect which is faster.
3. Load balancing for large sites. Naked domains, also called bare or apex domains, are configured in DNS via A-records and have serious availability implications when used in highly available environments such as massive on-premise datacenters, cloud infrastructure services, and platforms like Heroku. for maximum scalability and resiliency applications should avoid naked domains and instead rely solely on subdomain-based hostnames.
4. Cookies. The best practice is to assign cookies to the subdomain.
see Heroku devcenter: https://devcenter.