When experts discuss protecting a website, the focus is all too often on preventing hacking, hijacking, or malicious codes. As a result, other important aspects of website security — applications, servers, scripts, and databases — are overlooked. The need to incorporate plans for disaster response, recovery, and continuous operation is pushed to the back burner and fails to ensure a holistic approach to web security.
Your website is vital to your branding. This piece takes a comprehensive look at web security to ensure your website’s continuous operation.
The Hosting Environment
The hosting server you subscribe to affects your web security. Among dedicated servers, shared hosting, and VPS, shared web hosting is the least secure. This is because once any website sharing the server is compromised, other websites on the server become susceptible.
Besides, all the customers sharing the server also share one database, causing all the websites to be susceptible to database-associated vulnerabilities.
Your web host should be able to protect your website against denial of service attacks. They should also have the capacity to detect system intrusion in their server or network.
Webmasters operating dynamic websites using server languages like PHP, Python, and Perl should protect against those languages’ well-known susceptibilities.
Many web hosting services now offer email integration as part of their hosting package. Before making use of such an application, however, the webmaster should inquire and ensure that the application is hosted on a separate server to minimize the website security risk.
For those trying to decide which hosting service is best for them, consider digging into the web host server, application, and network security. Specifically, you can inquire about:
- If the web host can defend against server and network denial of service attacks
- If the server has an application layer firewall
- If they can detect and prevent intrusions in their system
Reliability
The reliability of your hosting server is vital, especially if you attract millions of users regularly. Regardless of whether your server hardware is an enterprise-class grade or PC grade, the hardware is susceptible to failure, and it can happen at any time.
To prevent your website from going out of operation, you may require hot or standby hosting servers.
Cloud hosting is deemed to be the best in terms of reliability and cost-effectiveness, but it also has data privacy limitations. You can study cloud security to educate yourself more about cloud hosting limitations.
Furthermore, to avoid website outages during a large traffic spike, you need to ensure your server can share the load. Your website requires sufficient resources to deal with thousands of user requests per second, so ask your web host about their load-balancing plan.
If your primary concern is about load sharing, and data security is not a priority, you should consider cloud hosting because it excels at dealing with traffic surges and is cost-effective.
Malicious Attack Protection
Find out your web host’s plan for defending your web server from malicious codes, viruses, and other sophisticated hacking techniques before choosing the web hosting solution. Also, inquire about their action plan in case your website becomes compromised.
Physical Security
Before signing on, you should be asking your web host:
How do you t guarantee that unauthorized persons don’t gain access to my web servers?
Is there backup power in case of natural disasters?
Data Backup
You need to make sure you backup your website as part of your disaster management strategy. You may choose to backup your website on a cloud server, off-site server, on-site server, or a combination of all.
If your website is only a few 100 megabytes, you can easily keep a local copy of your database and website. However, when your website is several gigabytes or terabytes large, keeping a local copy becomes difficult.
An efficient solution is to have a separate backup server in your web hosting service provider premises. The only drawback is that you won’t restore your website if a natural disaster affects your web host. Having a backup of your website in several different geographical locations is recommended.
The truth is that no web host solution will protect your website 100%, but these suggestions will help you minimize the risk of a website security breach.
