Choose a hosting option

Transcript

In this video, we’ll show you the hosting options available in tags and how to configure these hosts for your tag properties when necessary. When implementing tags in a website, all of your code and configuration settings are contained in the JavaScript library file. Each page on your website needs to reference this file so we can listen for events and execute the rules that you’ve configured in response. When we talk about hosting and tags, we’re referring to where the JavaScript library file is stored and how your web pages ultimately access it. There are two types of hosting and tags Adobe managed hosts and self-managed hosts. Adobe managed hosts are managed through our content delivery network or CDM, hosted by Akamai. Self-managed hosts, by contrast, are managed through your own web servers through a secure file transfer protocol or SFP. Each of these options has its list of pros and cons, so let’s run through them. Adobe managed hosts are the default option and are automatically created for you whenever you create a property. This option makes updating your library file quick and easy. You simply run the build within tags and the file is automatically uploaded to Akamai’s data centers around the world. To install the library, you simply load a JavaScript file in your website code and there are different versions of that file that you can use for quality control in your development, staging and production environments. As a client, you don’t have to do anything else. The one drawback is that you don’t have as much direct control over site security settings. Adobe managed hosts use industry standard security settings, and Adobe is very aggressive in supporting user privacy. But some clients, like financial institutions, may require more control over security settings than Adobe managed those can offer for these clients. SFTP is the way to go. Self-Hosted files give you complete control over things like cache control headers and company specific security settings. These self-hosted files also provide the fastest performance because the library is hosted on the same server as a site content. When it comes to drawbacks, firstly, there are more steps to set it up. Adobe pushes the library of file to the clients s of PTP server, but then the client has to move the file to their web server. SFP also requires an SS key to be hosted on the client server to accept the file. Secondly, the client has to manually control the library, file through the different environments and the publishing flow from dev to staging and then onto production. So let’s hop into the tags interface and walk through the process of managing your hosts like all other configuration settings and tags. Hosts are contained within a property, so I’ll click into this web property here. Once we’ve landed on the home page for the property select hosts in the left navigation. Here you can see that we have one active host for this property, which is managed by Adobe. This is automatically set up out of the box for every property that you create. So you only need to interact with hosts when you want to alter this default configuration. You can see that the host type is Akamai, which is the third party vendor that we mentioned earlier. Now, you may be tempted to create additional hosts to cover your dev staging and production environments, but with Adobe managed hosting, one host is all you need as it takes care of the entire code migration process through its own internal partitions. For most organizations with standard security requirements, the default setup of one Adobe managed host will work perfectly fine and you don’t need to tinker with your host settings at all Whenever you make a new property. Now, if your organization does not fall in that category and you want direct control over your security protocols, you’ll want to set up an SFTP host instead. Let’s say that we’re implementing tags on a financial company’s website and we need strict security control settings and this case will need to create one or more SFTP hosts to manage our different libraries on separate web servers. So to start will select add host and were prompted to provide a few basic details for the name. We’ll call this self-hosted Dev. Since we’re setting this up for the website’s development server under type, we’ll select SFTP. Now that we’ve picked a type, we have some more info to fill out when it comes to the company’s SFTP server. So here we would enter our server URL, then our path, and then the port, which is typically 22 for SFTP servers. Next, we need to provide some user credentials so that our tax hosts can authenticate to the server, which includes a username and an encrypted private key to obtain this key. You must have an essential key pair that was generated by your server or otherwise installed on it. The private key must be encrypted using GPG before you copy and paste it into the box here. For more details on the encryption process, please refer to the documentation. So now that we’ve got this all set up, we’ll go ahead and click Save. Once the host has saved the system, attempts to ping the server to test whether the credentials you provided are valid. In my case, you can see that the connection has failed since I entered in some fictitious values for the sake of this demo. If you see this status in a real world scenario, you can click back into the host and correct the configuration before trying to connect again. So we’ve created a dev host for the financial company’s corresponding server. From here we would run through the same process to make additional hosts for staging our production as required. Once you’ve set up all your self-managed hosts, you can assign them to their appropriate stage in the publishing flow using the environments tab, giving you direct secure control over your JavaScript libraries as they move through the process of development, approval and publishing. Thanks for watching.