Hosting, Performance & Security

Hosting is optional in the RFP. Newism can deliver the platform on Urban List-managed infrastructure, or provide a managed hosting and operational support model.

Urban List may also choose to continue on the existing Newism-managed hosting arrangement under the current contract. This provides continuity for deployment pipelines, monitoring and operational support during the platform transition.

Our hosting approach focuses on predictable performance, strong operational visibility and infrastructure that can safely absorb traffic spikes.

Infrastructure

A typical architecture for the platform is:

Cloudflare (CDN + WAF) → Origin application → Search (Meilisearch) → Object storage (S3)

Environment structure:

• Local development environments for engineering work
• Staging environment for QA, stakeholder review and release validation
• Production environment with monitoring and operational safeguards

Supporting infrastructure:

• Cloudflare CDN for edge caching, security and traffic management
• Background job queues for heavy processing (imports, indexing, image processing)
• Meilisearch for search and filtering
• Automated backups for database and assets
• Uptime monitoring and alerting

Traffic handling and scaling

Urban List regularly experiences traffic spikes driven by social sharing, newsletters and media coverage.

Our primary strategy is aggressive edge caching through Cloudflare, serving the majority of traffic directly from the CDN rather than the origin.

This approach:

• Serves requests from Cloudflare edge locations close to the user
• Absorbs traffic spikes at the CDN layer
• Keeps the origin application stable during viral traffic events
• Reduces operational complexity compared with autoscaling architectures

For a content-driven platform like Urban List, edge caching is more reliable than dynamic autoscaling. Most traffic is anonymous and cacheable, so a well-designed caching strategy handles significant surges without requiring the application to scale dynamically.

Craft CMS is well suited to this architecture: anonymous page output is deterministic and highly cacheable.

Availability and uptime

Maintaining availability during a platform transition is as much about operational maturity as it is about code. We bring monitoring, alerting and a proven incident-response rhythm to reduce risk during launch and peak traffic.

We provide uptime reporting and proactive alerts (SMS, email, slack) for downtime.

The following UptimeRobot checks illustrate recent availability across public Urban List endpoints.

Endpoint	URL	Uptime (30d)	Uptime (90d)	Uptime (365d)
Sydney	/sydney	100.000%	100.000%	99.974%
Melbourne	/melbourne	100.000%	100.000%	99.979%
Brisbane	/brisbane	100.000%	100.000%	99.991%
Perth	/perth	100.000%	100.000%	99.979%
New Zealand	/nz	100.000%	100.000%	99.972%

Image optimisation and cost efficiency

If Urban List is currently using Imgix, we recommend evaluating an AWS-native image pipeline during the rebuild:

• Store original assets in Amazon S3
• Deliver images through CloudFront
• Generate responsive variants and modern formats (WebP / AVIF) through an automated resizing layer

Newism already operates AWS's Dynamic Image Transformation for CloudFront and includes it in our recommended hosting model. Benefits include significant cost reduction, predictable pricing, strong CDN caching, and reduced dependency on third-party image platforms.

We would validate expected savings during discovery by reviewing current Imgix usage.

Cost reference

As an example, the Dynamic Image Transformation stack we operate for mytiki.life currently runs at approximately $45/month, primarily consisting of S3 storage, API Gateway and Lambda processing.

Urban List will differ in traffic and storage requirements, but it demonstrates that AWS-native image pipelines can operate at very low ongoing cost.

Reference implementation:
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/implementations/dynamic-image-transformation-for-amazon-cloudfront/

Security

Security controls span infrastructure and application layers:

• Web Application Firewall (WAF) protection
• rate limiting and traffic filtering
• least-privilege infrastructure access controls
• dependency monitoring and update management

Craft CMS itself has a strong security posture when kept up to date. As part of the operational model we define a regular update cadence to ensure security patches are applied without long delays.

Backups and disaster recovery

Automated backup strategy:

• Full server backups (last 2 days)
• Scheduled database backups (daily, weekly, monthly and yearly rotations) on S3 with lifecycle policies
• Periodic restore testing to verify backup integrity

Operational support & SLA

If Newism provides hosting and operational support, we provide:

• Uptime monitoring and automated downtime alerts
• Defined incident severity levels
• Clear escalation paths for critical incidents
• Incident response procedures for production outages

Urban List has direct access to the people responsible for operating the platform, rather than being escalated through multiple support layers. Support SLAs can be defined based on Urban List's operational requirements.