About Us
We are currently only accepting clients by referral. If you came here looking for web hosting or development, you'll find a list of Best Practices that we adhere to and you probably want from whatever provider you interview. Please feel free to look around and get ideas on what questions you need to ask when choosing who will be responsibile for your online image.
BrightShinyObject is a full service online provider
- Web site, email and mailing list hosting
- Drupal site and tool development
- Custom web applications
Specializing in large, high demand and highly available dynamic websites.
Development
We develop dynamic, high demand sites using various PHP frameworks and the Drupal Content Management System. Please do not be offended if we feel your development needs fall outside of our wheelhouse and recommend other companies and technologiesthat may better fit your needs. Trying to wedge your requirements into our process would not make you a happy customer, nor keep our developers happy.
Your Team
Just because a site or web app works, does not mean it's right. Security holes, untested corner cases and new bugs can blind side you. Here are some things to verify about anyone you are trusting to create your online image:
- Developers need to stay up to date on the latest security issues to make sure you are protected.
- Using the latest tools properly save coder headaches and customer costs.
- Automated testing is critical to catching security issues.
- Continuous full regression testing makes sure new bugs are not being introduced.
- Version control prevents conflict between developers, provides accountability and makes sysadmin much easier.
Hosting
Your hosting company is wholly responsible for your online image of integrity. If your site becomes unreachable, you appear unstable to your customers. You are depending on their networking and server knowledge more than their website and email experience to keep you safe and responding quickly to customer clicks.
- Don't trust your site to the latest techonologies or buzzword laden companies.
- Only use hosting providers have a long track record of reliability and solid performance.
- Make sure they monitor, maintain and can quickly restore backups.
- Never rely on technology that has not proven itself production ready.
- Do not use anything in your production stack you are not fluent in.
We keep things simple and solid, often ignoring promises of "blazing performance" to stay with proven tools and technology we have years of experience using. This is why we have never told a customer that a problem was out of our hands or was "waiting on a ticket from support," and neither should you.
Monitoring
Know when something starts to go wrong before your customers see problems.
All sites we host or maintain are under constant montitoring and recording for:
- Hardware strain : cpu load, memory, disk space and io, network traffic
- Security and recommended updates for OS and services
- Spamlisting of domains or IPs, including neighbors.
- Registration expiry
- Dead links
- Software licenses
Recovery
We believe here are two types of sites : Those that are in peril, and those that are about to be.
- Be ready for an issue with hardware, OS, platform, or a disk issue.
- What will you do when your site has been hacked? Can you restore it to a pre-compromised state?
- Heavy backup scheduling is critical for disaster recovery.
- Demand encrypted redundant online and physical storage of backups, both locally and off-site.
- Backups need to be tested regularly for validity and to insure a full recovery if necessary.
- Frequent sandbox test-restores confirm backups are usable and detect problems early.
Be ready for whatever happens, and have tested and retested to make sure, before it does.