ITT310 Provision of a WordPress Web Hosting Service Provider - AWARD

Award outcome

Description

The University of Northampton existing managed hosting contract is due to expire and so are seeking a managed WordPress hosting service from Spring 2024. The University is looking for a partner to host our public website as well as blogs sites and other sites related to the university. The host will have a minimum of six years experience, with at least 1,000 plus customers. There is a requirement for the ability to install multiple WordPress sites with the facility to allow a multisite system on a WordPress site where needed. The University of Northampton existing managed hosting contract is due to expire and so are seeking a managed WordPress hosting service from Spring 2024. This service needs to be hosted in preferably in the UK. The hosting service will be required to host several WordPress sites, including a Restaurant site, Hotel Site, a Blog site with multi-sites enabled, Virtual Tour and the main University public website which runs multi sub-sites for areas of the university which require a public facing website. The main University public website had over 3 million visitors in the last year and so the successful tenderer will need to be able to handle peaks of high activity/traffic. Also, the successful tenderer will need to provide 24 hours per day monitoring of the public website ensuring issues can be detected and resolved quickly. Over the period of the contract the University's AV, Digital and collaborative tools Team will also be moving websites, microsites and blogs which are used elsewhere within the university to the hosting solution. This will include having multi-site enabled for some sites so that microsites and blogs can sit under their respective sites. An example of this is Awards and Module catalogue ( https://www.northampton.ac.uk/awards/ ) currently sitting under the public website ( https://www.northampton.ac.uk/ ) installation. The total hosting of at least 30 sites (A mixture of Live and Development/Staging sites) will be needed with expansion as more sites are brought into the hosting environment. Our bandwidth usage is around 1.2TB a month with 959GB of this being taken up by our main public website and can go higher in our super busy periods such as Clearing and Welcome Week. The total storage for all our websites is approximately 250GB at the present time but this is growing by approximately 2Gb a month. However, we are unable to calculate two sites growth patterns as they have only recently come online. The ideal supplier will become a strategic partner for the duration of the contract which will be two years. The supplier will need to add value by providing the University with support services, such as consulting and possible assistance with assurance of code along with the core provision of the managed platform and hosting. This should include all software version and security updates as applicable during the term of the contract. There is a requiremen...

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