Every shop running on 1sixty8 Manifold trusts it with the things the business can’t do without: customers, invoices, payments, work orders and inventory. Keeping that information safe comes ahead of any feature I build. So I’ve moved 1sixty8 Manifold onto a brand new server of its own, set up from the ground up for security, speed and room to grow.
A lot of software runs on shared servers, where a bunch of unrelated websites and apps all sit on the same machine. This one is dedicated. The hardware runs 1sixty8 Manifold and nothing else, so nothing unrelated shares the machine that holds your data. It’s fully managed and watched around the clock by a professional hosting company, right down to the physical hardware.
Security comes in layers, and no single one of them does the whole job:
- Every business gets its own separate database, so one shop’s information is never mixed in with another’s.
- A web application firewall screens incoming traffic and blocks malicious requests before they reach the platform.
- A firewall on the server itself automatically shuts out anyone who keeps trying to break in.
- Every page is served over a secure, encrypted connection (that’s the HTTPS at the front of the address).
The server stores everything on two fast solid state drives, and they’re mirrored. Every piece of data gets written to both at the same moment, so they always hold identical copies. Think of it as keeping two identical sets of books, updated together every second. If one drive fails, the other keeps right on running with no lost data and no downtime while the bad one gets replaced. The drives are monitored constantly, so a problem gets caught early. If one of them quits in the middle of a busy Saturday, nobody at your counter should ever know it happened.
Mirroring protects against a drive failing. The backups protect against everything else, and there are three kinds:
- A separate backup drive inside the server keeps daily backups for 28 days.
- An independent backup service copies the whole server every day to a different location, and keeps daily, weekly and monthly copies.
- Every business on the platform gets its database backed up nightly.
On speed, the new machine has an enterprise class processor with 16 cores and 64 GB of memory, on solid state storage throughout. That’s more than twice the processing power and eight times the memory of the server it replaced. Day to day, you should see it in page loads, searches and reports, and it should stay steady at the busiest times.
I also built it with a lot more capacity than 1sixty8 Manifold needs today, so there’s room for new shops to come on and new features to be added. A second data center location is part of the long term plan.
Every change on that server is planned, tested and checked by real people. Running a shop is hard enough without wondering whether your data is safe, fast and there when you need it. That part is my job.
If you want to know more about 1sixty8 Manifold, it’s functions or anything else about it, I invite you to reach out..