Service to sites we host
When we decided to offer hosting to our clients we did so knowing that we would now have to vet and maintain all the plug-ins and platforms we set up for each of them. Backing up each site nightly and offering them the ability to recover from breaking changes caused by software evolution became imperative for us and for all our clients.
After the most recent network failures at GoDaddy, and the exploits one reads of on the interwebs, hosting sites for clients is a risky activity, but one that ultimately benefits our clients and helps protect them.
Is your hosting set up correctly?
Everyone thinks they can save a few bucks by hosting with a low-cost service. But what you don’t know about set-up, monthly updates, and plug-in conflicts can kill your site. Christopher Budd writes in his article To Host or Not to Host: How Vulnerable Is My Blog to a Security Breach?
A good professional managed service will meet this threat environment by keeping up on the latest vulnerabilities and keeping the platform as up-to-date as possible. These days, keeping a blogging platform secure is a full-time job that requires specialized expertise. Unless you or your staff want to be blog security engineers, you can’t match their ability to protect your blogging platform.
Additionally, a good professional managed service will only provide capabilities on your blog that they feel they can reasonably protect. This does mean that you may have to sacrifice some functionality especially around shiny new capabilities, but as we’ve said before: in security, new can equal dangerous…
…A hosting service may cost more than self-hosting, but I promise you that your costs will skyrocket after a successful compromise. In some cases, when self-hosted blogs don’t have adequate backups, the blogs are simply gone for good. I’ve known more than a few blogs to disappear because of a successful attack after the owner failed to keep the blog software up-to-date and adequate backups.
Our monthly software update service ensures all software, platforms and modules running your website are up to date and you have current back-ups. We also fix any breaking changes caused by software evolution.
Can you manage your site?
Unlike other hosting services, we also provide full CPanel access to your site. Many hosting providers don’t want to do this, giving you no access at all. They set up your hosting as a shared install on their CPanel. It takes us more time to set up your hosting so you have full CPanel access, but in the long-run, it is the right thing to do for you the customer.
With this access you can easily set up your own e-mail accounts and forwarders. You can see full data on all traffic to your site using the CPanel tools.
So, don’t cheap out on yourself or your site. You may come to regret it.
Read the Christopher Budd article on Social Media and Online Security – To Host or Not to Host.
If you need hosting services and local support, give us a call at 843-628-6434.
