ESBD_File_353517_Attachment A.docx

ATTACHMENT A - CAPABILITES

Capabilities common to ALL categories of website hosting (To be completed by ALL Respondents)

Authentication integration for the hosting platform and/or website administration areas with common SSO technologies including SAML and Azure Active Directory.

Web Application Firewall, DDoS Protection, and other forms of threat blocking.

Website, web application, server, and network monitoring with notification capabilities.

Web application and web server malware scanning and removal.

Automated notifications if usage limits are approached. Ex: notifications if bandwidth, CPU, memory, disk thresholds are approached.

Automated vulnerability scanning and patching.

Web application and web server log access.

Ability to easily scale up & scale out capacity as needed for increased traffic, file system storage, database, bandwidth, CMS users, etc.

Ability to create and migrate between separate environments (ex: dev, staging, test, production).

Managed server upgrades and security patching.

Automated backups and disaster recovery systems.

API to manage common hosting tasks (ex: create, update, delete a site, a user, etc.).

U.S. hosting locations. Please indicate if hosting in Texas is possible.

Compliance: FISMA, HIPAA/HITECH, FERPA, SOC2, ISO, CMMC, TXRAMP, FedRAMP, PCI (specify all that apply).

Availability: one 9, two 9s, three 9s, four 9s, five 9s.

If applicable, please specify capacity limits for different hosting plans. For example, storage, monthly visitors, bandwidth, concurrent CMS users, backup frequency, number of sites that can be hosted, etc.

Automated website migration capabilities and tools.

Dedicated account team and/or other channels to provide product feedback.

Onboarding, training and documentation for administrators.

Performance monitoring dashboard or reports.

Support for different DNS and subdomain configurations. Examples: supporting both A records and CNAMEs pointing to hosted websites, support for hosting websites with third-level and forth-level subdomains such as:

sitename.orgname.tld sitename.subdomain.orgname.tld

Capabilities for Hannon Hill Cascade CMS hosting (To be completed by RESPONDENTS who provide Cascade CMS hosting)

Managed hosting, upgrades and security patching for Cascade CMS and supporting infrastructure.

Customer support for Cascade CMS issues and questions such as issues with/questions related to Cascade development, hosting, administration, and publishing.

Support for many concurrent Cascade CMS users.

Capabilities for managed WordPress hosting (To be completed by Respondents who provide WordPress hosting)

Automated TLS certificates for all WordPress sites included with hosting services.

Automated WordPress, plugin and theme updates with options to schedule updates to run during a defined maintenance window.

Automated visual regression testing for WordPress, plugin and theme updates.

Ability to create a site blueprint or duplicate an existing WordPress site to create a new site.

Ability to automate migrations between dev/test/staging/production environments for a site.

Ability to delegate the administration of specific WordPress environments. Ex: under a university account, allowing admins at different colleges to each create, manage and remove sites for their college without having access to other colleges.

User permissions for the hosting admin console. Ex: ability to give some users access to just billing or only to specific sites.

Self-service cache clearing.

Self-service creation of one-off backups.

Self-service site restoration from backup.

Content delivery network (CDN) integration.

Ability to offload Media files to separate server or common cloud storage services such as Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage or Google Cloud Storage.

User activity log for the hosting admin console.

Access for encrypted file transfer protocols and/or console access such as SFTP and/or SSH.

Access to a site database management tool such as phpMyAdmin.

GIT integration.

WP-CLI access.

Tools to easily migrate from a local development environment to the hosted environment.

WordPress Multisite support with options to configure for a subdomain or subdirectory configuration.

Headless WordPress capabilities.

Ability for administrators to easily switch between PHP versions.

Capabilities for no-code website builder platforms (To be completed by Respondents who provide a no-code website builder platform)

Ability for A&M System Member institutions to create accessible, reusable, branded website templates and components.

Tools to allow administrators to add CSS, JavaScript and markup. For example, making it possible to add Google Tag Manager.

Ability to allow/guide users to build and maintain websites that are compliant with WCAG 2.0 AA or better without writing code.

Ability to restrict users to a pre-defined list of website templates and components.

Free, automated TLS certificates.

Ability to easily scale capacity for additional websites, web editors and web traffic.

Ability to easily scale capacity for additional websites, web editors and web traffic.

Activity log & user permissions for the admin console.

Activity log & user permissions for the content management system for individual sites.

Ability to delegate the administration of specific websites.

Built-in website search.

Content approval workflows.

Ability to create a site blueprint or duplicate an existing site to create a new site.

Ability for Admins to manage and lock header, branding, and footer content.

Ability to bulk import and/or export content, images, and files.

Web form builder.

Ability to create different content types. For example: a landing page, standard page, bio page, blog post.

Ability to schedule publishing or to put content in an unpublished draft state.

Versioning for web content, ability for users to restore a previous version of a page or file.

Automated site-level backups, ability for an administrator to restore an entire site as well as single/multiple pages, components, files, and other content types from a backup.

Capabilities for generic managed web hosting (To be completed by Respondents who provide generic managed web hosting)

Support for hosting static websites (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.).

Support for hosting dynamic websites (PHP or other language support, please specify).

Self-service capability to change language version (ex: change from PHP 7.4 to 8.0).

Database hosting (please specify database types available).

Platform: shared, dedicated VM, dedicated cloud environment, dedicated physical, other (please specify).

Content delivery network (CDN) integration.

Git integration.

Access for encrypted file transfer protocols and/or console access such as SFTP and/or SSH access.

Access to a site database management tool such as phpMyAdmin.

Activity log & user permissions for the hosting admin console.