Whether your website is personal, business-oriented or political, it is only a matter of time before it attracts malicious attention. And the more successful your site gets, the more malice it will draw. Because competition would like to cripple your venture, or someone simply doesn’t like what you say. This is why protected hosting must not be some reserve in the back of your mind, but at the forefront of it. An excellent hosting service will include such protection in the basic package.
Most Common Website Sabotage
The Internet has made malicious behaviour drastically easier to enact. Anyone can search up a tutorial or a finished script for all sorts of bots and website hacking and sabotage techniques. You no longer have to be smart, educated, or especially tech-savvy to engage in such ignoble behaviour. Therefore, protected hosting has become a no-brainer requirement if you want to have any website. The favourite and most useful tactic that is deployed to shut down a website is the DDoS attack – Distributed Denial of Service.
DDoS uses bots – a script that performs a specific function – to overload a server’s bandwidth that is hosting a website, with the intention of exhausting its resources until a point where the server can no longer process requests for viewing the website by ordinary, non-malicious users. Web hosting services offer a varying degree of protection against DDoS attacks, depending on how much you are willing to pay to ensure your website stays online and runs smoothly 24/7. In order to make and informed & safe choice, you can read a variety of online webhost reviews before making a decision.
Make Your Attackers Impotent
The maximum level of protected hosting is the so-called ‘level 7’ WAF, which stands for Web Application Firewall. If you expect a lot of traffic, and your content could be considered controversial or incite ire for some other reason, this level of protection will definitely be worth it. You might have noticed that sites for large companies go down exceedingly rarely, and the deployment of this protection is the reason why.
Level 7 WAF protection will ensure that every data packet sent to the server goes through a serious of rigorous algorithmic checks to ensure that the requests are legitimate, and not malicious. In short, it monitors, blocks, and filters all the traffic coming into and going from a web application. However, it would be prudent not to rely only on the integrated security offered by your web hosting service. If you do not regularly update your CMS (Content Management System) with updates for security, themes, and plugins, you risk having someone exploit its exposed vulnerabilities.
Neglecting Security Is Foolish
It would be nice if we lived in a world where the cost of security would be relegated only to the most risk-heavy activities, but sadly we don’t live in that world. The methods for committing malicious website attacks have increased to the extent that hackers require no special skill or knowledge, so such behaviour has become a low-entry activity. Accordingly, you must consider some degree of protected hosting as a necessity, not an additional web hosting feature or a luxury.