We want to share with you one of the greatest pains ever felt at ThemeFuse.com.
We went through the entire nightmare of a hacked website!
The one thing we understood from this experience is that anyone can get hacked if he cares too little for his website security!
After we had got hacked, we researched everything: we read tons of comments & reviews, we compared several hosting plans, and now we’re here to share all our findings with you.
We did this research for our website; that’s why we did it vigorously, with passion and dedication.
That’s what this story is about.
All these aspects made us look everywhere for the most reliable hosting provider. While it seems easy, choosing the best hosting plan can be a very tricky and complicated task for both beginners and advanced users – there are big fish on the market that are exceptionally good at selling their services!
Are their hosting products the safest? Stay tuned; we did all that research for you!
Slowly but surely, we got to the icing on the cake; now let’s talk a little bit about security issues.
Did you know that over 9 million websites are currently hacked? Didn’t you?
It makes sense. Such information can expose the hosting providers as lots of virtual attacks can carve through a poorly handled hosting. It happens much more often than you can imagine!
To put it differently, being online is a responsibility and will eventually cost you something.
Getting your website hacked doesn’t just expose your business and your brand, but it can also harm your client’s integrity (especially when you work with sensitive data) and your entire website’s network.
One important rule you should remember is that a shared hosting plan is a highly dangerous choice. If the hacker gets access to one vulnerable resource, all the rest are also in danger.
Speaking about security and hosting
Nowadays, different providers try hard to improve their services, security being one of the most crucial things you should care about when choosing your hosting.
For example, InMotion’s WordPress hosting comes with an integrated solution – the Sucuri security plugin that systemically scans your websites for exploits and security risks; they also offer remote backups and anti-virus protection.
Even if you choose a provider that doesn’t provide full protection to your website: we strongly recommend you to use the Sucuri Plugin – it costs about $5 per month, but it’s worth it.
What’s the deal with the hacking thing? The co-relation between hosting and hackers
The greater part of hosting providers offers backup solutions, and there are lots of plugins that provide backup as well, but there is a problem with all of these – they are all storing the back-ups on your hosting server.
When a hacker gets access to your server, he’s got all your data. Besides the fact that he harms your website, he grants himself „bonus–access” to a vast range of resources and sensitive data.
Too scary for you? Yeah, it was pretty terrible for us as well.
Nowadays there are lots of black techniques to harm websites.
For example, some smart hackers can steal money this way; they do it quite swiftly, taking just a small commission from websites’ sales. Let’s call it „hacker’s payday” – around 5% of all your website’s sales, just because they were smart lads and managed to hack your website! The website’s owner doesn’t notice this at all, or he might think that this is a natural decrease in sales.
Yes – these things happen daily. Your hosting can be their murder weapon.
But you can fight them. The first step is done – you got informed. What you do with this information makes the difference: of course, you can do nothing and be ignorant to invite dangers, or you can choose to be a responsible internet space consumer.
Your minimum indebtedness is telling your friends that the web is a highly dangerous platform if no security solutions are implemented. Share this valuable data now! You can spare your friends a lot of trouble later on.
Co-relation between hosting types and cyber crime
Should you go for shared host?
For security reasons, we do not recommend using shared hosting at all, as we consider this hosting to be highly dangerous and quite uncontrollable unless you own a family website that is visited only by you and your granny.
Howbeit, some reasons can make you temporary use a shared hosting plan. Maybe you are at your very beginning – as a new business, your first concern is getting some online presence as fast as it is possible. You do not expect to get quickly >2000 daily visitors/daily; or, maybe, you have limited resources – serious hosting require some bigger investment of both time and money.
Shared hosting can be a cheap solution for test websites, personal diaries or websites where uptime is not an adequate care.
! Keep in mind: you can use a minimal shared hosting only for a small internet website (i.e. Christmas greeting card website). For any bigger ones, you have to choose at least a middle hosting plan.
*If you keep insisting on using a shared plan, you can trust InMotion Hosting. It is a good provider that gives value for your money. For a shared plan, you get all in one – hosting, backup plan, security plan – so that you can sleep worry-free knowing that there is no significant danger for your website. They bring in an excellent deal of SSD hosting and helpful support.
Their offer can be considered a little more expensive than others; it is explicable by the fact that they come with great security solutions.
What about VPS Hosting vs. Risk of Hacking?
We would recommend VPS hosting as a safe and affordable solution (its cost is cca. $20/month) to anyone who cares about security.
When working with reliable providers, a VPS can be a good choice in terms of security for a business oriented website or even an e-commerce, but the in-house teams are still in charge of taking the necessary steps to prevent hacking or frauds or to ensure these steps were taken.
You can find a lot of more expensive packages, but even the lowest package will be a lot better than any shared hosting solution.
Who can we recommend?
One good recommendation can be A2’s VPS Hosting; that is highly oriented on speed, security, and power. They come with 2 options: Managed VPS Hosting and Unmanaged VPS Hosting.
For Managed VPS Hosting A2’s VPS comes with 100% worry-free HostGuard management. Meaning that you don’t need to worry anymore about your hosting. These are the biggest benefits you will get: managed hardware and network, right software & high security.
Dreamhost – their VPS are a great solution with SSD storage that includes all that you can expect from a reliable VPS hosting: scalability, the extensive array of features, security, reliable uptime and good speed (it can meet either the requirements of large eCommerce websites). Some other resources are allocated to each hosted site without limitation, including domains, monthly bandwidth, email accounts and FTP/sFTP users.
Dedicated Servers and Security Stuff
The price of this kind of hosting is a bit high, but for large companies, it’s a reliable option because of its enhanced performance and security. With dedicated hosting, you own your unique IP address that’s worth it for the safety reasons.
This is especially important if you are running a large e-commerce website that requires credit card processing.
This type of hosting suites you if you care deeply about your website’s security – when you host your site on a shared server, you lose some of this safety.
The other websites you share the server space with could open you up to liabilities, whether because of a simple mistake or through cruel intent.
If you own sensitive information or only want to shun the annoyances of a data breach or virus attack, dedicated server hosting might be right for you.
Which hosting provider can we recommend?
SiteGround – Their key areas are: excellent customer service, care about security, creativity, and high quality. SiteGround has been proactive too by creating some beautiful solutions for their clients such as SuperCacher, Developer features & Toolkits for WordPress. They provide high-class dedicated machines – they utilize just the latest hardware, which is regularly updated & they always improve their equipment whenever possible. They furnish a lot of highly innovative proprietary software to boost server performance and give more functionality.
A2 Hosting – their servers, resources & tools can get your job done quickly and successfully. A2’s Dedicated Hosting can be truly named a user-oriented and performance-oriented product because they are highly proactive constantly working to make it better. They come with nice custom software solutions, excellent speed & great website security (FREE CloudFlare CDN and HTTP/2), and tons of optimizations (e.g. optimized caching tools).
If you own a WordPress Website, you can confidently pick WPEngine – it is a provider that excels in every aspect that matters: security, scalability, load time, and uptime. WPEngine has a vast experience of working with WordPress.
Always updated with the latest hardware to maximize server performance, WPEngine has got some best software, built exclusively for WordPress users, that makes their product extremely competitive and their performance a ridiculously great one.
WPEngine is conceived for those that don’t care about technicalities but want their site to be up and running well. It suits WordPress-based websites like a glove. WPEngine’s hosting solutions are a bit more expensive than what their competitors bring in but don’t panic; it all makes sense because it comes with great security options. For many people, however, the extra investment will be worth it as WPEngine ensures a secure WordPress install and a speedy and well-performing website.
It hosts WordPress websites only, and it’s completely worth it as they focus mainly on making WordPress a more secure CMS. WPEngine provides best-in-class customer service on top of innovation-driven technology.
Some final thoughts about hosting plans
Some more facts you should know about hosting regards its impact on your visibility, your website speed, search engine rankings and much more. To point out the most important areas of hosting influence, you’ve got to know the co-relation between:
– Hosting & website speed: It’s as simple as ABC – bad hosting makes a website run like a turtle. There is a huge difference between different providers’ hosting speed. Let’s nominate just a tiny top of the fastest: InMotion Hosting, WPEngine (just for WordPress) & SiteGround. An excellent solution comes from InMotion; they’ve got SSD drives on their shared plans, which can ridiculously improve your website’s speed.
– Hosting & SEO: talking about website’s speed, we cannot ignore the SEO part; one crucial thing you should consider when choosing a hosting provider is that search engines already admitted that they use website speed as a ranking factor. So be vigilant – you can excel at this chapter if you have got a good hosting plan. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. You can further discover that you have some unexploited uranium under your bed.
– Hosting provider’s professionalism: When talking about websites, you may think that you should care just about the technicalities. However, technicalities are just a little part of it. The server is the same as your computer at home. It needs to be updated and maintained. Who you will ask for technical help when you’ve encountered a problem – makes a big difference. Most providers also offer server management, but if you buy your server, you’ll need to be your tech expert.
Regarding that, we should tell you a cautionary tale. It happened in earlier 2006. An „X” hosting provider erased an entire database by typing a wrong (very wrong!) line of code. We’re not just talking about the loss of money; we’re talking about annoyance, stress and huge amounts of money, my friend!
If you’ve got to remember at least a sentence from this article, here it is: Whatever your website is about & whatever your sphere of activity is – we urge you to care about your website security first and foremost.
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