Best practices for managing a hosted site

Test thoroughly before going live

Jive Cloud Admin lets you make changes to your live site. Before you use it to make changes to a production environment, you must test carefully. We recommend testing changes in a local development environment as well as a UAT instance and completing all acceptance tests before you deploy changes to your production instance.

Manage access carefully

You should are aware of who has access to your installation and what changes they are making. For example, always check Recent Activity before updating to ensure you don't overwrite changes made by another user.

Enable maintenance mode first

Before you restart or make changes using Jive Cloud Admin, enable maintenance mode. Then disable maintenance mode when you finish updating, and verify that your site is visible as usual. Maintenance mode will not be automatically triggered when your site becomes unavailable during updates or restarts, or automatically disabled after your work is complete. You always need to enable and disable it manually.

You can choose to upload a custom maintenance page if you don't want to use the standard one. For more information, see Uploading custom maintenance page.

Plan the timing of updates

Most updates only take 10-15 minutes. But database backups when uploading WAR files can take much longer, depending on the size of your database. During these times, except theme updates that can use rolling restarts, your site will be unavailable. In addition to timing site updates for times when your site traffic is low, you may want to contact Support to coordinate critical updates to ensure that Jive Cloud Admin is not in one of its brief maintenance windows.

Stand by during updates and restarts

Most updates and restarts are successful, but we recommend watching them as they happen, refreshing the Recent Activity log to check that your site is up and running after any changes.