We are committed to providing highly secure and reliable hosting platforms. Giving untrained, inexperienced people access to a complex server is inconsistent with this commitment. As such we do not provide clients (or third party teams) with direct access to our servers.
We understand some clients may have had direct access to their servers in the past. This is often called cPanel access and typically associated to budget (bulk) hosting. cPanel is simply one brand of software that runs Linux website servers. There are many others and they provide a way to control the highly complex mail, file, domain, security and website settings on a server. We do not use cPanel on any of our WordPress servers. Furthermore, we do not use any commercially available control panel software on any of our hosting platforms.
Our virtualised private servers (VPS) are configured with a system developed by Plesk (https://www.plesk.com/). Plesk runs on both Linux and Windows environments and has a far superior service which can be specifically tailored to assist WordPress owners. Our servers are then wrapped in two tiers of management to ensure they are keep updated and running smoothly. Control over the access to the servers is an essential part of maintaining their reliability. As such we do not give clients or their third party consultants with access to Plesk.
We appreciate that clients are pressured by their search engine optimisation and/or third-party consultants. We recommend that clients get more technically involved in the work that these consultants intend to perform. We have yet to find a legitimate consultant that needs complete access to the server. We acknowledge that having uninhibited access to everything makes work vaguely faster. This is false economy because all optimisation is a slow process.
Marketing consultants are not server qualified administrators and should never be given administrator access to any client assets. While consultants may have some experience with specific tasks, they do not have the training to administrate a server and can cause irrevocable damage.
Unrestricted access immediately exposes the business, server and/or website to less control and increased opportunity for security and reliability breaches. These can be irrecoverable. In these situations the work involved in tracking and correcting issues are more complicated and inefficient. This is why we simply do not provide the access.
Any time a third party gains root, administrator or a high level of access, we revoke any guarantees whether implied or part of a service level agreement. We will accept no responsibility fort any damage. Unless legally forced we will not investigate to determine the source. Naturally we will be there to support and recover any damage. Support will be charged for discovery and recovery.