FileMaker® databases are incredibly intuitive to use but the costs and time involved in setting up and maintaining them on your own in-house server isn’t in everyone’s budget or wheelhouse of expertise. Serving your vital business and personal FileMaker databases on your own can be a daunting task. Do you have a server that you can dedicate to this task? Can you afford the licensing costs? What happens if the server goes down? Who will you call and how long will it take to get back up and running? Who will setup and monitor your database backups? Did you know that you can’t back-up “live” database files with 3rd party back-up programs? If you don’t have a skilled person on staff to help you answer these questions and carry out these tasks, perhaps you should consider hosting your FileMaker databases in the cloud.
FileMaker Hosting Differences You Can Count On:
While there are many choices out there for hosting a FileMaker Pro Database, keeping things focused and simple to efficiently accomplish your hosting needs is our philosophy. Here are some things that make Productive Computing, Inc.’s FileMaker Pro Database Hosting service different:
1. We are a large FileMaker Platinum development firm with an expansive and expert knowledge of all things FileMaker (not just a hosting company who may or may not know how FileMaker works under the hood).
2. We have dedicated servers with SSD drives (nothing virtual, nothing slow) and as a result have read/written times faster than just about any traditional hard drives. Would you believe our servers can do a full reboot in 35 seconds!
3. We don't “pig pile” our servers with too many files or customers and we always use the latest version of FileMaker server and OS security patches.
4. FileMaker WebDirect™ hosting is available to bring a desktop-like experience to users via a web browser without the requirements of traditional web programming.
5. We perform local backups, backups to a physical attached drive, and to the cloud. That gives us 3 points of redundancy for disaster recovery and up to 30 days of data.
6. We provide a daily DropBox backup for those customers who want the peace of mind to know their data is at their fingertips. No cumbersome FTP programs are required to get at your data should you need it.
7. We provide direct FileMaker Server Admin console access for users on FileMaker 12 - 13 where they can close and open files, download files, etc. We can provide direct access to FileMaker 11 Server Admin as well for developers who request it.
8. For developers who are thinking of referring their customers to us, we treat their customers as if they were our customers. Often developers want to know that your customers will be treated as well as you would treat them in the event your customers would call us directly.
9. We provide a unique IWP scenario for FileMaker 11 - 12 users that will auto redirect to a web page of your choosing upon IWP time out or IWP Log out. We developed this technology here in-house and it's truly one of a kind.
10. Distance from the server to the client is a big factor which is why we are continuing to invest in our infrastructure by putting servers in all corners of the country.
Keeping Web Hosting and FileMaker Hosting Separate: Why?
We recommend to our customers to have and/or keep their websites hosted using a traditional web provider (like GoDaddy, Bluehost etc.). The reason for this is that for a very low price you get a standard web server has all the bells and whistles needed for your web development team (i.e. the correct PHP version, standard web security, robust web control panel, population and performance stats, scalability, accessibility, redundancy, secure certificate, standard PHP reusable code snippets / built-in plugs for hit counters, forms, validation, shopping cart, Word Press, etc.). If you host your website on a double-duty FileMaker/Web server, the service provider has to provide all these extras which gets complicated fast and providing service and maintenance on all these other technologies is time taken away from being an expert maintaining your databases. And you wonder why they don’t return your call or answer the phone when you have a problem. They are up to their eyeballs in all that stuff.
Even still, we offer IWP and the ability for anyone to use an external website with PHP while at the same time talking via PHP directly to our hosted FileMaker servers. The only requirement for a client is to have their PHP files and the web files on a web server outside our infrastructure. Typically when a client comes to us for hosting, they already have their own website hosted elsewhere and prefer that as the location for their PHP files.
Keeping it simple and focused allows us to be your on call experts for FileMaker Services and FileMaker Database hosting. Our brand has a strong reputation because we do not try to be everything to everyone. Focused expertise is our key to servicing our customers in the way that they expect to be serviced.
