Did you know that October is ‘Cyber Security Awareness Month’? I thought it fitting to create a blog post explaining the measures we go to to ensure our website hosting is as secure as possible.

Firstly, we don’t promote our web hosting, it is mostly a service we provide to our own website design and development project customers. This ensures that we know exactly the code that is hosted on the servers and also means that our servers are not overloaded.

Here are just some of the methods we use to ensure our servers are super secure;

DDoS Protection

You have probably heard of DDoS in the news, DDoS stands for Denial-of-Service. This means that there is a targeted attack on your server, sending floods of connections to a server in an attempt to overwhelm it and cause it to fail.

Our servers identify a DDoS at source and prevent these connections. This means that legitimate traffic can browse your website unaffected.

Web Application Firewall

All traffic is monitored through our firewall before it reaches your website, meaning only legitimate users browse your website.

24/7 Malware Scanning

Should anything malicious find its way to your website files, we are continuously scanning for suspicious files. On detection, we are notified and can choose to remove or ignore if the file is legitimate.

SSL Certificates

We offer SSL Certificates to add an extra layer of protection to your website. This keeps data transferred through the website private and secure.

Brute-Force Login Protection

A common method of gaining access to a website is through a brute force attack, that is, trying millions of username and password combinations on a log in form. We recognise this type of attack at a server level and block the users at source, preventing impact on to your website.

Website Backups

Every website is backed up daily, you can also choose to backup your website through our control panel whenever you wish. Restoring from a backup is as simple as selecting your backup and clicking to restore.

FTP Lock

Files behind a website are usually managed through a process called FTP. Attackers can gain access to your FTP and have full access to your files. We lock our FTP to prevent this, but provide access to you either on a timed basis or using your IP address.

CDN Security Headers

This one is a little more technical, I’ll let you google it in your own time. Using CDN Security Headers protects your website against a wide range of typical attacks.

Don’t all website hosts offer these security methods?

Unfortunately not, it’s actually not standard to offer these at all. For example, without brute force protection, a user will try millions of username and password combinations on your login form. This will severally impact your site performance for legitimate visitors until the attacker either stops or does gain access.

We have taken over hosting of many websites, it’s not uncommon for our server to highlight many infected files when setting up the hosting. The old host hadn’t detected the virus/malware at all, leaving it free to do whatever it was intended to do.