Hardware and Software Upgrades, and a New Website Monitor

We have developed our own website monitoring system for websites under our management. The user interface will have a few more features in the near future as we wrap up the other changes we're rolling out, but it is otherwise ready for daily use. You can find the status monitor at https://status.gapcreekmedia.com.

The system currently alerts us to HTTP Status Code changes, and we have plans to expand this to client notifications before the summer season arrives. Until then, you can see your website uptime, uptime history, and server response times at the link above.

Last year we left managed hosting companies for Google Cloud VMs. This year we're taking full advantage of having control at the Operating System level. We'll be implementing security and backups for each VM and replacing the WordPress plugin we've been using for this, which is BlogVault. This also removes a third party as a point of data liability and the less places we have user data, the better.

To accomodate the new software, to make autoupdates for WordPress plugins and themes run with less disruption to performance, and to resolve slow load times that result in false positives with Google Search Console for page layout issues, we are increasing RAM to 2GB per VM from 1GB with some of the money we're saving from dropping BlogVault.

BlogVault has been a reliable and essential part of our platform for over two years, and I highly recommend the product to anyone. Our decision to move to server-level resources is purely a technical decision.