January 31, 2014

Website Security

websiteDevelopmentIn this day and age it is no longer good enough to just have a business website, you need to make sure that it is secure and properly hosted. Customers expect your website to be ready and waiting at all times of the day or night.

Too often websites are run on ‘sub-par’ hosting, either you are on a crowded server serving every variety of websites or the hosting is not powerful enough to properly deal with the needs of your website. Add onto this that most hosting providers only really pay lip service to security and you have a recipe for disaster. They just do not have the expertise to ensure secure operation. All it often takes is for one website to be hacked and all are at risk, as most hosting providers do not know how to keep separate websites well apart from each other in their hosting systems. Even companies like GoDaddy cannot escape the scourge of hackers, to quote:

GoDaddy said on Friday that its network suffered a multi-year security compromise that allowed unknown attackers to steal company source code, customer and employee login credentials, and install malware that redirected customer websites to malicious sites.

Even if your hosting provider does not get hacked, what happens when the hardware itself goes ‘pop’ – have the backups been tested, are the backups themselves kept secure and not just hidden away on the same server? For instance, A Danish cloud hosting provider found its backups were not safe recently when it lost all its customer’s data after a ransomware attack, to quote:

Cloud host CloudNordic says most of its customers have “lost all data with us” following a ransomware attack on its data center systems, including its backups.

The Denmark-based cloud company said the ransomware attack began Friday, during which cybercriminals “shut down all systems,” including its website and email, and encrypted customer systems and websites.

In a notice on its website translated from Danish, CloudNordic said: “The attackers succeeded in encrypting all servers’ disks, as well as on the primary and secondary backup system, whereby all machines crashed and we lost access to all data.”

Do you really want to be in that situation? They really should have kept multiple backups over time to be safe…

We can help

Aykira knows all about hosting secure and reliable websites. We can ensure the hosting is properly matched to the requirements of your website and that it is secure. We will use security techniques like Defence in Depth and Separation of Concerns to make sure your website is secure. We can work with you to fix your website hosting and give you the reliable service you have been looking for all along. We can also tune your website so that it provides a ‘snappy’ experience for its visitors, which is also important for SEO (the speed your website loads at is a factor). Also given our technical expertise we can extend the features of your website in ways you probably didn’t know were possible, a great way to get ahead of your competition.

If you are interested in our services and would like to talk about what we can do, please fill in our contact form and we will be in touch.