Welcome to the Choose a Hosting Option course, my name is Doug Crookston. In this training we’ll explain what the launch hosting options are.

Launch offers two ways of hosting the JavaScript library. Each page on your website needs to reference this file so it can execute all the tagging that we create. The first is hosted by Adobe through our Content Delivery Network or CDM, hosted by Akamai. The second is Self-Hosted through a secure file transfer protocol, SFTP, on your clients web servers. Let’s talk through some of the pros and cons of both options.

Hosted by Adobe is the default and is automatically created for you. This option makes updating your library file quick and easy. You simply run the build within Launch, and the file is automatically uploaded to Akamai’s data centers around the world. This Include file is also control by Launch for your quality control on your Development, Staging, and Production websites. As a client, you don’t have to do anything else. The one drawback is that you don’t have as tight of control over site security settings. Having said that, Launch still has standard security settings and Adobe is very aggressive in supporting user privacy. SFTP is typically used by clients who have very strict security policies such as financial institutions. Self-hosted files give you complete control over things like cache control headers and company-specific security settings. These self-hosted files also give the fastest performance because you’re cutting out the extra step of having to pull this Include file. The library is hosted on the same server as the site content.

The first negative is that there’s more steps to setting it up. Adobe pushes the library file to the client’s SFTP server, but then the client has to move the file to their web server. SFTP also requires that there’s a Key file hosted on the customer’s server to accept the file. Secondly, the client has to manually control the Library file through the different QA environments from Dev, to Staging, and then onto Production.

Let’s now into Launch and walk through these two hosting options.

From the overview screen here in Launch click the Hosts tab, here we see the default Host, managed by Adobe, and you can see that our type is Akamai, that’s our third party vendor as we mentioned. There’s no need to create multiple Adobe hosted options, because Launch takes care of the production migration process from Dev to Stage and Production. So most of our clients with standard security needs use this hosting option. Now some of our clients do want to use the SFTP option. To understand this better, let’s say that we were also going to set up our We Finance site and we need strict security control settings, so we would want to create one or more SFTP hosts to manage our different libraries on separate web servers.

So we would come over here to Add Host, and then we would give it a name such as Self-Hosted, and let’s say this is our QA server, and then if we come down here to Type, we’ve got Managed by Adobe or SFTP, which we would choose, and then we can see all of these settings that we need to fill out for our FTP server. So here we would enter our server URL, then our path, and then Port is normally 22, and then we would have to put in or user information to get into the FTP, and then whatever the security code is. Once we have got this setup we’d go ahead and click Save. Now what actually happens is Adobe pings the SFTP server to validate that this will work. And we can see that this fictitious information I put in has failed, but we can close this and we could come back to it later and correct that. Now if in this scenario with We Finance, we’ve a QA server for Dev and our Staging, but we also would want to create one for our Production.

So we put in the name Self-Hosted Production, again the type would be SFTP, and then we would just fill out this information here. Our Path again, the port, and our user information, and then we would go ahead and save this one.

Then we go ahead and close this. Now that we’ve got these listed we can always check on them and delete them if we need to or we can jump back in here and make changes as necessary.

So by having these multiple SFTP options, it will allow us to control our JavaScript library as we move through the different approval process of staging and then onto production. What we would probably want to do is use our hosted by Adobe for our development environment because it makes it very easy to make those changes. So that’s it, these are the basics of actually setting up our hosts. -