Hosting, Support and Maintenance of Ofwat and Open Water websites and ongoing improvements for Ofwat

This ITT is for the tender of a new website contract for the next 2 years (July 2022 - July 2024) to uphold the hosting, maintenance, support and improvement of Ofwat's websites.

The website underwent a design and functionality refresh during the last contract (2020-22).

Alongside supporting the organisation with hosting and security arrangements, the Supplier selected via this tender will play a key role in building on those developments to help us deliver continuous improvements to the website's content, user experience and alignment with strategic objectives.

As well as the main Ofwat website there is the Open Water website.

This is used less often, as it is primarily a microsite with set information that rarely needs updating.

The two sites are: http://www.ofwat.gov.uk and http://www.open-water.org.uk The main Ofwat website is overseen and managed on a day-to-day basis by the Communications team, specifically the Digital and Design Team with whom this contract sits.

The Communications team works with colleagues across Ofwat to deliver core corporate and communications activity via the website.

The Communications team work with the incumbent Supplier to: - Maintain and develop content, functionality and user experience - Address issues concerning functionality, user experience in a timely and efficient manner - Address issues concerning continuity of service in a timely and efficient manner in line with SLAs.

The incumbent Supplier's contract ends in ...nt.

Given the timeline we anticipate that this will be a renewal of the current hosting and security arrangements.

However, in spring 2023 the successful Supplier will be asked to assess whether these remain the most appropriate and cost effective solutions.

Both the Ofwat and Open Water websites are built in WordPress 5.9.32 and have a number of bespoke WordPress plugins.

The Ofwat site has approximately 1100 pages, 5200 publications and 15,300 media items to be hosted and added to; Open Water has 43 pages, 30 documents and 260 media items to be hosted and added to.

The current hosting provider is WordPress, which is managed by our current website support provider, there is an auto-scaling component within the solution, though the current providers have not seen any major spikes in system resources for the past two years.

The servers are on AWS London Data Centre (eu-west-2).

Website and database are backed up on a daily basis with 30 days retention period. only.

Regarding the current server configuration, there is a separate VPC for each system (Ofwat / Open Water) and both have their own database instance.

Auto-scaling is on OFWAT only and there is a manual scaling option on Open Water.

The Content Distribution Network (CDN) is called Cloudflare, it also acts as a WAF and is managed by our current website support provider.

Current administration users access the panel using a WordPress account log in with CMS access restricted to authorised IP addresses.