Hosting, Domains, Compliance and Security

For Everyone: We only have one level of hosting, compliance and security, and this is used on every single one of our websites for the piece of mind of everyone involved.

We take the hosting of our infrastructure very seriously. We promise 99.9% uptime, monitoring every minute, 24/7 support, dedicated firewalls, DDoS protection, and a back up every hour.

Since day one we set out to provide the best service possible to The Scouts. We wanted to lead, and we knew having mediocre servers wouldn’t cut it. We’ve invested in a Cloud hosting infrastructure which gives us (and you) complete flexibility and unlimited growth options.

Our infrastructure is a lot more than just a WordPress theme. Yes, each website runs on WordPress to allow for easy administration, but the complexity within our framework ensures we’re able to roll updates, new features and functionality, bug-fix, and keep everything up to date easily, every single day. You can read more about this here. We’ve built the platform on top of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting platform.

On top of this, we’ve worked with The Scouts to ensure we’ve ticked every box in terms of compliance and security. When you work with us, you instantly get reassurance that we’re:

• Fully GDPR compliant, and we’ll ensure that your website is too
• Covering every domain we manage or host with an SSL certificate
• Monitoring our infrastructure every second, and anything abnormal is reported directly to our 24/7 support team
• Taking hourly back-ups of your live website, just in case the worst happens (or someone makes a mistake)
• Aware of, and have plans in place, to ensure we’re less likely to be subject to a cyber attack.

It’s for these reasons above that we can’t let you host our platform elsewhere. It won’t run on another hosting platform – and even if it did, we can’t promise the above and it wouldn’t be updated daily as it should be.

Do you deal with domain names?

Of course. We want to take as much hassle away from you when it comes to launching a website for your Scouts. Whether you’re a Group, District, County, Region, Area, Activity Centre or Event, you have two options when it comes to domain name:

1. We can hold your domain name for you, and this is covered in the annual charge we bill you as long as it ends in .uk
2. You can hold your domain name, and either yourselves or ourselves just need to change some DNS settings – we can talk you through this.

We don’t need to hold your domain – feel free to hold it if you’d prefer – but there is a huge benefit to us holding it (aside from the cost being covered by us). If something goes wrong, a volunteer moves on, or they become very busy, you know you have a professional company to lean on for any support you may need.

Scout Websites was founded and is run by Josh Diamond, who is Assistant County Commissioner in Cheshire. Josh would be more than happy to answer any queries you do have. You can book a call in with Josh here »