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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 a JavaScript library file. Each page on your website needs to reference this file, so it can listen for events and execute the rules that you’ve configured in response. When we talk about hosting in 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 in tags, Adobe Managed Hosts and Self-Managed Hosts. Adobe Managed Hosts are managed through our Content Delivery Network, or CDN, hosted by Akamai. Self-Managed Hosts, by contrast, are managed through your own web servers through a Secure File Transfer Protocol, or SFTP. 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 Hosts 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 the site content. When it comes to drawbacks, firstly, there are more steps to set 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 an SSH key to be hosted on the client’s server to accept the file. Secondly, the client has to manually control the library file through the different environments in 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 in 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. In this case, we’ll need to create one or more SFTP hosts to manage our different libraries on separate web servers. So, to start, we’ll select Add Host, and we’re 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 tags host can authenticate to the server, which includes a username and an encrypted private key. To obtain this key, you must have an SSH 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 is 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 and 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.