It is a general opinion that building a website and designing it is more important than providing a secure hosting on a proper server. But if you really think about it, by securing your website, you are securing your data. And, have no doubts, data is the most valuable asset of the digital era.
Everyone needs a secure website
Whether you own a personal blogging site or a medium to large business, security on a website is like the front door of your house. If you lock it every night, then you need a secure website 24/7 because, unlike us, the Internet never sleeps.
With a hacker being a popular profession at the beginning of this millennium, everyone with a website is a possible target. As any thieves, hackers look for easy targets and sensitive data that they can exploit.
They use special scripts for this purpose – web crawlers, they seek for low security, vulnerable CMS installations. Once identified, these bots create a list of possible back doors, and a hacker can gain control over your website and data.
By making sure all your plugins on your website are up to date, you can prevent this kind of scenarios. But what if you own 50 or 200 different websites? This is exactly why having secure hosting services is important. With centralized control, you can set rules that can take care of these things for you. Something like antivirus software on your computer.
Secure Sockets Layer – SSL
With the Internet connecting billions of people around the world, there are also a billion transactions happening online every single day. Hackers and thieves see this as an opportunity for their personal gain and often try to find a way to divert some of these funds to their accounts. For this reason, all your visitors should be able to trust you with their data, especially financial transactions and sensitive private data.
By providing an SSL protection layer for your website, you ensure that all the data from one point to another are being encrypted. This way you know that communication between any browser and your website can’t be compromised or forged. By having this type of security layer, you are making sure that all your visitors feel safe.
Don’t forget that SSL is one of Google’s ranking factors, and websites with SSL will have an advantage over the less-secure ones.
Monitoring, backup and support
With enhanced server monitoring, you are making sure your website is always working fine, and you know that if any kind of problem happens, someone will be able to fix it fast.
Daily and weekly backups are also a very important aspect of any online business. With regular backups, you don’t need to worry about your data is safe in case something unexpected happens.
High availability
If your business depends on high visitor count, or need to have high uptime, additional security is something that you need to think about. DDoS attacks are one of the most popular ways of sabotaging your website, but luckily many hosting providers offer DDoS protection in a standard package. By doubling uplinks with multiple ISPs data centres can ensure great availability. DDoS protection can be organized on many layers so look into the list of things hosting providers offer before deciding about the right one.
Try to find a hosting provider that offers something like Wanguard anti-DDoS traffic analyzer, and implements intelligent firewall rules on the switch level. Look for Bitninja/Imunify360 on servers, and an optional CloudFlare protection that can help with website security and integrity.
Fast website or no website
The loading speed of your website can be your biggest advantage or your greatest weakness. Google uses its crawler that measures the response of your website and calculates this into the equation when the website rankings are made. As much as you need a secure website, it doesn’t matter if your rankings are bad, and people wait 20 seconds for a website to load. Pick a stable, well-known hosting provider that uses high-end infrastructure, with high availability servers, that can grow as your business grows. A renowned web authority, Website Planet recently did a review about Hostinger and ranked it number one web hosting provider among 3424 web hosting providers around the globe. You might want to check it out.
Take your time, list all your needs, and then start your search for a good hosting provider. Go for those that tick all your boxes, have advanced security features, great uptime guarantee and high-end infrastructure. This way you will have a proper foundation for any kind of website, and a safe and secure place for your visitors.
