Website Hosting and Support Services

The vendor is required to provide for the provision of hosting and support services for its public-facing websites.
- Provide a best-in-class public-facing website to its constituents, offering a variety information relating to events and critical services being performed by the city.
- Resulting agreement will be as follows:
1. The provision of cloud hosting services, with an optimized content delivery network (CDN); and
2. The provision of maintenance and support on the city’s core Drupal platform.
- The city’s public-facing news site is located at website and consists of 800 html pages and 500 images files.
- The city therefore considers the availability of the website and news site to be absolutely critical to the ongoing delivery of its services.
- The city’s website and news site are centrally managed and maintained by the web team, website content is also maintained by approximately one hundred (100) content editors from individual departments across the city via Drupal 10, the city’s content management system (“CMS”).
- Drupal 10 is presently hosted on the google cloud platform (“GCP”) via the incumbent provider for the services and cached by the proprietary fastly content delivery network (“CDN”) product for increased security and performance.
- Drupal development and maintenance services are presently performed by the web team; this includes the following:
• Installation and testing of new Drupal modules;
• Patching of existing Drupal modules;
• Creation of new templates;
• Creation and maintenance of Drupal elements, including content types, taxonomies, views, and menus; and
• Configuration of the core, and expanded features.
- The city’s department of information technology will manage the DNS for the website.
- The city invites proposals from qualified proposers to:
1. Provide and support cloud hosting and CDN services for the website and news site;
2. Provide and support cloud hosting and CDN services for city net (optional-will not be factored into the evaluation process); and
3. Support and maintain the core of the Drupal application.
- Please note the following:
1. Cloud hosting and CDN must reside within the borders of the states; and
2. The host administration portal must integrate with okta SSO.
- Develop, document, maintain and continually improve delivery of the services to the city
- Develop, document, maintain, continually improve and implement procedures to support the management and tracking of provider’s delivery of the services against prescribed service levels
- Ensure that all changes to services are conducted in accordance with city policies
- Maintain ownership, via third-parties or in-house, the official city change control board/process
- Provide services data and information in mutually agreed formats and timing
- Conduct annual (and ad-hoc as the city may request) contract governance meetings
- Provide necessary training to ensure web team is capable of performing the duties and responsibilities described herein
- Provide invoices and credits according to city billing and invoicing policies
- Provide a secure, resilient, and scalable web hosted environment
- Manage, administrate and optimize web hosted environment and infrastructure to meet city website requirements
- Ensure that where web hosting is sub-contracted and hosted by a third party, city-owned data must be available to the city
- System user access and authorizations must be provided as directed by the city
- Manage, administrate and optimize CDN to meet city website requirements
- configure security protocols within web hosted environment, and CDN, according to city security policies
- Provide and configure web application firewall (WAP) on CDN
- Ensure that the city website remains hosted on dedicated instances (logically separated from other clients)
- Provide additional environments (multi-Devs) that may be required by the web team from time-to-time (e.g., Drupal migrations, etc.)
- Configure web hosting environment to ensure that sufficient capacity in services is offered at all times (e.g., auto-scaled instances, disk storage, server CPU, IP endpoints etc.) these configurations should be automated wherever possible.
- Ensure that all server, database and other third-party products licensing used to deliver the services are maintained and updated with all security patches and bug fixes in a timely manner, and according to city security policies
- Provide web team with access to backups that may be downloaded and deployed within a local environment
- Provide, upon city request, website analytics, data, and other reporting, as may be necessary
- Ensure that the integrity of all data transitioned, (databases, metadata, links etc.) is maintained through the course of the transition, such that the solution functions and operates substantially in the same way that it did prior to transition.
- Contract Period/Term: 2 years
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: March 10, 2025