You have probably noticed that there are lots and lots of hosts on the web, all with varying degrees of pricing. But what’s the reason for that? More often than not hosting prices are directly related to security and support. However, neither are represented well online and it is quite complicated to determine just which web hosts have the services you need.
Why You Need Secure Web Hosting
Website security is extremely important. Just think of the following situation: you invest a lot of money and time into your website, and it goes down right when the site starts to take off because of a DDoS attack or phishing scam. You need secure web hosting to prevent virus and malware injections. Safe hosting keeps your data away from fraud and identity theft.
This formula is your key to success.
Five Key Features of Secure Hosting
Secure Datacentres
Secure datacentres must withstand anything and everything Mother Nature has to throw at them, literally. Acts of God such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes are legitimate threats. Secure facilities take precautions such as onsite backup diesel-powered generators, fire suppression systems, and other protective measures. Pay close attention to the location when selecting your web host and give preference to the areas of the world that are not predisposed to natural disasters.
DDoS Mitigation
Distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) can take down your website and damage your online business reputation. A secure web host will have a tactical strategy to automatically mitigate the flood of requests sent by DDoS attacks as well as other types of abuse.
Data Recovery
Back up, back up, back up. A good rule of thumb is that “if your data does not exist in three places, it does not exist at all.” Meaning redundancy and retention are not an option, but a necessity. A high-quality web host will have a data recovery plan in place. Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be making your own copies. Because you should. 100%. If you are not backing up your website please open a new tab and come back. Right now you need to do yourself a huge favor and make a backup. You can thank us later. Remember, it’s not if data loss happens, it’s when.
Remote Backup
As part of a data recovery plan, remote backups are an added layer of security. In the event of an emergency or natural disaster, the risk of data corruption from fire, water, and wind skyrockets. Without stating the obvious, data restoration is not possible if the backup is destroyed onsite at the same datacentre facility. For this reason, offsite backups are preferred.
As a matter of fact, that’s why we would also encourage you to download backups to your own PC as frequently as possible. For example, the most common retention periods are daily, weekly, and monthly. Of course, daily backups are the best choice, assuming you have the extra disk space needed. That way when the time comes to restore your site you will have the most recent version available. Running manual backups after a major site update is always a good idea too.
RAID
RAID adds redundancy to your data and keeps it safe during hard drive failure. RAID is a redundant array of independent disks mirroring images of each other. So, if you lose a single drive to corruption, the other(s) will preserve the data while the failed drive is replaced. Then the data is immediately copied onto the new hard drive disk or SSD as soon as it is mounted.
At Gecko, we provide secure web, VPS, and dedicated hosting. Get in touch, or select one of our plans to get started today.