Is Your Website Secure?

The answer is not obvious. A better question might be “Should I Change Hosting Providers?” The answer to that question is ‘maybe’.

You likely spent a chunk of change on your website and a reasonable amount more on other marketing driving prospects and clients to your website. In addition, you may have read my articles on why everyone needs a membership site and set one up on your site. Or maybe worst of all, you do eCommerce on your site and it’s not protected.

With all that investment and more, why would you trust your hosting to the cheapest provider, or the provider who mostly hosts hobby and personal sites? I know business owners who host with a provider who charges $9.95 per YEAR to host. You cannot get good hosting for $9.95 per year, it is not possible, the economics are just not there.

Those business owners probably have several monthly charges they are more than willing to pay for like maybe a payroll service, or online postage service, or a live chat provider, or larger ticket items like Infusionsoft or Hubspot. They often don’t see the value in paying for a top tier hosting provider.

Like anything else, all hosting providers are not created equal.

More and more your website is your prospect’s first exposure to your business. Why wouldn’t you spend a few more dollars a month to be sure that your site is up, it is as protected as possible from hackers, it loads fast and you get top notch support?

Do you trust your nutrition to the cheapest fast food joint, or your health to the cheapest clinic? Don’t trust your website and your business to the cheapest hosting provider.

The health of your business is at stake.

What questions to ask

While you don’t need to understand how hosting works behind the scenes, you should know what questions to ask your potential hosting provider:

• How do they provide a secure environment to host your site? What’s their track record?
• Do they apply regular updates to the operating system and other core components of the server? (It may be your job to maintain your site’s software…more on that later.)
• Do they have a good backup plan?
• Do they have a good catastrophic recovery plan?
• Do they have a good firewall?
• Do they have anti-malware protection?
• Do they do vulnerability scans?
• What’s their customer service program?
• How do they communicate with you?

The list goes on and, and while some of it may sound like gobbledygook, these are important answers to know. If you don’t know how to interpret the answers, ask your tech guru to find out for you.

The point is that hosting is not as simple as putting up a server and hanging out a shingle.

There are many fine hosting companies out there and many not-so good-ones. You just need to do your homework because your business depends on it! Remember that price is NOT the best indicator, but the cheapest is probably not the best either.

Just today I got an email from a pretty famous marketing material supplier who said that his site got hacked. I do not know who he was hosting with, or how the site got hacked but, if you were him, wouldn’t you want to minimize the chances of having to send out that sort of email?

What else you need to know

There are other things to consider that may be particular to your hosting or business needs. You may just need part of an existing web server to host s simple website, but you may need more. Be sure to consider things like:

• size of the server
• whether or not you’ll need your own dedicated server
• will you need multiple servers to do specific functions like a web server and a database server
• what’s your anticipated load
• do you need compliance with things like HIPAA and PCI
• and on and on.

The bottom line is this: it is not as simple a decision as you might think.

Feel free to contact us as we are happy to answer your questions about servers and how to figure out your hosting needs. We offer secure managed hosting services for small-to-mid-size businesses, including automatic updates for Joomla and WordPress sites.

Having provided hosting services for over 15 years, we’ve seen just about everything and would be glad to chat with you about your hosting choices and help you decide if you need to make a change.