July 8, 2014 | By:

How Secure is Your Website?

How secure is your website? Do you host your website on a shared server? Are you using a content management system with 3rd-party web applications? Is everything kept up-to-date? These are all questions you need to know the answers to.

If you have a small website and keep everything up-to-date, you can probably get away with being hosted on a shared server. For larger sites where you collect user data or take payments through some sort of an E-commerce solution, you are probably better off having your own dedicated server.

There are lots of web hosting options out there but I’ll try to keep it relatively simple. There are shared servers and dedicated servers. The easiest and cheapest solution would be shared hosting. It’s less secure because your website would be sitting on the same server as hundreds of other websites which may or may not be kept up-to-date. We have our own dedicated server where we host most of our clients, but if you’re a company without an internal IT team, you might want to go with a fully-managed dedicated solution. It’s definitely a more costly option but if your business requires more security, being hacked could cost you even more.

Keeping your website and 3rd-party web applications up-to-date is important because vulnerabilities which allow hackers to gain unauthorized access to your website are discovered daily, and patches are released to help combat them. Not updating these patches right when they’re released leaves your website vulnerable to all kinds of potential threats. Some systems are more secure than others, but there is nothing that’s absolutely hack-proof.

Passwords are another very important item when talking about security. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen weak passwords. Try to keep your passwords over 8 characters long and include uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and special characters when allowed. Also, be sure to keep your passwords stored in a safe place. Do not upload them to a forward slash on your web server as those can easily be found by anyone on the world wide web. To help you generate good passwords, I recommend using this website: strongpasswordgenerator.com

And lastly, be sure to never reuse the same password twice as an added security measure.

Here are a few tips to prevent from being hacked:

– Make sure you use a strong unique password for each of your accounts.
– Keep your web server and web applications up-to-date.
– Don’t host your website on a shared server if you handle sensitive data.
– If you’re in over your head, contact a security or IT professional.

If you are uncertain about the current level of security of your website or web hosting solution, contact us and we’ll get you taken care of. Give us a call at: 888.420.5115.

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