Website Hosting & Security

Our Hosting & Security Packages

Our Hosting & Security Process

1. Upgrading WordPress Core

   We make sure WordPress core on your website is updated to the latest version. But before we push that update live we make sure that there are no bugs or issues in the latest version. Often we’ll wait a few days to update this to the new version to make sure that it is completely secure. There have been cases in the past where the latest WordPress update causes quite severe issues for websites so we are very proactive in preventing this.

2. Upgrading WordPress Plugins

   This can be where most website owners find the most trouble, often they aren’t sure which plugins to update so opt to not update any at all. This can lead to serious security issues, there will often be some sort of “backdoor” into the old version of a plugin that can make your website vulnerable. Our team keeps up to date with all of the popular plugins and similar to WordPress core often won’t push an update if we know it’s going to break something on the website. We’ve been updating plugins on sites for years so we’ve seen almost everything and know what warning signs to look for and pitfalls to avoid. These updates are performed monthly or fortnightly depending on how many updates have been released.

3. Alerting with any issues

   If our team finds any issues then we’ll alert you to make you aware of it. In most cases, this won’t be a problem but if there are potential issues we see happening in the future then we’ll let you know.

4. Will fix any hacks free of charge

   We are confident in the high level of security that we provide and to date, we haven’t had a website hacked. But in the case that your website does get hacked we will fix it free of charge.

5. Daily Backups

   Our hosting provides daily backups that will be retained for 2 weeks. If there is ever an issue then we can restore back to a previous version of the website. When we make any updates to WordPress or Plugins on the website we will create a new backup just in case something goes wrong. This happens more often than you’d think, we will then work out what plugin is causing the issue and fix it.

Web Hosting & Security – Why it’s worth it

Being experts at WordPress Web Design Brisbane we have seen many issues over the years with websites hosting and maintenance. This allows us to give excellent advice since we’ve seen pretty much everything.

So a couple of quick key questions that people ask about this service we provide you know what do you do? why is it so much more expensive?

It’s more expensive because most of the work is manual, there is a lot of a human time that goes into reviewing the plugins that need to be upgraded, we obviously have a huge number of plugins across all clients that we look after doing this, we upgrade WordPress core, it’s obvious really but we also upgrade all the WordPress plugins and we’ll alert you if there are any issues. I mean that is really a big part of it, we’ll go through and do a little test make sure everything’s okay and if there’s anything wrong we’ll roll it back, work out what is wrong and fix it if applicable or if it’s a larger issue we’ll get in touch and let you know.

eCommerce Website Upgrades

Then with some particular clients, so this is again a bit more expensive but for a mission-critical eCommerce platform, we’d actually do all of the upgrades and everything in staging so we would take a clone of the website and put it aside, do all the upgrades there, test everything, make sure it’s all okay and then roll that code back over the top of the production side after having taken backups of course.

Backups

Now every time any upgrades are done, there should be backups but we also do backups every day, they’ll retain for about two weeks on the server yeah pretty awesome really. So if you choose host your website yourself you should definitely run backups when you’re doing the upgrades, we do the backups as well every day.

We Don’t Host Email

Nope, we don’t host email, not interested, don’t want to host email. So if you need email and you need it because most people when they buy domain name they’ll get a little kind of cPanel account and they don’t really realise that you don’t have to keep your website and your email all in the same place, so your email can actually stay there on that cPanel account if you already have it set up on there. Then you can move your website over to our service or SiteGround for example, now if you’re going to SiteGround that’s just an ordinary cPanel thing so you can move everything, you can move the website and email into there but that would be you buying from SiteGround, do it with them and they can help you, they can migrate you.

We don’t host emails, emails can be problematic – nobody wants to pay decent money for management of emails until something’s gone wrong and then it’s obvious it’s somebody’s fault. But it’s very important that you put your email somewhere safe I would recommend Google Apps, we know a couple of companies who can do that for you and there’s also office 365 you can move all the email to there, that is the most common and the most reliable way of doing it.

Our Recommendation: Separate Hosting & Email

One of the fundamental things is that if something goes wrong with your website, you need to hold them responsible like “hey my websites gone wrong”. I mean if you’re with us we’d notice before you even log in but, if you’re going to go with even SiteGround I would probably recommend you split your email away from your website anyway. It’s worth monitoring it, for example, we have an account with a third-party service, we use Panopta and what we do is we’ll ping the servers on a regular basis just to make sure they’re all up and everything’s running.

That’s worth doing if you are concerned about mission-critical stuff obviously that testing needs to be done in a decent way so that you don’t hit the server too hard, you don’t want to certainly hit it every minute and you don’t want to hit it with lots and lots of different protocols, you just want to maybe do a ping test or a string test where it fetches a page and it just looks for your name and the page just to make sure it’s still working correctly and it’s not just serving up a blank page which WordPress can do when stuff goes whoops.

Case Studies: High Impact Security

Yes, okay, so I can tell you a story about somebody that’s very risk-averse, so this company is an insurance broker, they are a very successful insurance broker and they’re pretty smart. They are used to selling people insurance, they know all about protecting your business or your car or your home they know all about that stuff where insurance companies take on the risk.

So this insurance broker what they do is they will provide you with protection, now the protection in most cases is after the fact, so they sell a cybercrime policy where if something happens, somebody hacks into your website and somebody hacks into your business then they steal stuff. If you’ve taken some precautions and you get hacked where they take value or harm your business then they’ll cover you under the policy of how much that it’s worth.

Now that’s very well but this company realises that just having the insurance is not as good as actually having the full protection of somebody who knows what they’re doing and who can protect their website, who can host it and put the steps in place to prevent an attack from being successful. So we have a bunch of different clients but this one, in particular, they need the website to be secure, they don’t store client data or anything, no credit card transactions or anything like that in the website, it’s just a corporate website with normal information. It mainly includes lead generation for them and their business but fundamentally it would be a reputational risk for them if the website was hacked.

If they had crossbones on the homepage or issues like that, it’s pretty common to be defaced when it happens especially during a first attack and then the hacker would then go and post that on a hacker forum. Saying, hey, I hacked into this website and I got in like this and then along come other hackers. So you actually need to get on these things really very fast so for us as far as the client is concerned they know that their website needs to be kept safe and secure. We do charge this extra figure because we go through, upgrade WordPress, upgrade the plugins, alert if there are any issues, fix any hacks free of charge and do consistent backups.

Case Study: Peace of Mind

If a client ever has a problem, they can come to us ask a question and we monitor it and make sure that it’s safe and secure, basically, that’s one of the main things – peace of mind. I could probably tell you about a different client in the engineering space they decided they were going to take their hosting to somewhere a bit like SiteGround. They decided that they were going to finish up with the security service that we were providing, they were very happy with it, they just wanted to save the money instead of spending a couple of grand a year.

Their website had big eCommerce components and managed a big portfolio of products well over 10 thousand products and what they wanted to do was actually have all of that moved across to another host much cheaper a couple of hundred dollars a year, instead of a couple of grand and they’re technical people they migrated the site and they didn’t do a very good test when they migrated the site.

Some things broke but that wasn’t terribly serious they were easy enough to fix and they got that all sorted out. They then moved the site and then when they were up and running, they actually found that everything was okay but they didn’t upgrade the site so they were back in the same position that we were in when we had clients who were just doing hosting not doing the upgrades.

But one of the problems that they faced was that without having done the upgrades some of the bits in the site weren’t working correctly. They had upgraded part of the site but they hadn’t upgraded all of it and because their website was quite complicated, they actually found that they were getting out of sync and there were some issues basically, some technical issues. Now, we would have spotted that and we would have rolled the upgrade back then we would have let them know that they actually had a little bit of code work that needed to be done to make two plugins talk to each other because the two versions were upgrading and they needed to be matched. Either we would have to do a bit of custom work to make sure they matched and talked to each other or you wait until one has an upgrade and then when you upgrade it you can just make sure that they talk to each other. That way you can just wait for the second one and then although there was an upgrade available for that, you just don’t take the upgrade yet and then they’ll work together.

So they realised that our technical skills were reasonably valuable, certainly worth the value of an extra sort of $1600-$1700/year and they brought that website back to us. They just realised that they needed somebody who really knew websites, WordPress, in this case, inside out and that knew their website really well. We had already spent a year looking after the hosting, so we knew some of the quirks and issues about how it had been built by the developer.

The good thing in their case was they kind of came back to us and said well alright we want you to take this back and we were able to go back and pretty much re-create the website within about 3 hours. The longest part of moving the website back across to us was actually the domain name pointing from one location to another. Even that didn’t take too long and then that’s it really.

A couple of examples of clients that we’ve helped, we do have some maintenance plans but we talked about those on a different page, the maintenance plans do also go hand-in-hand with this service, so I’ll explain those elsewhere, there’s a table below that’s worth looking at in far as the maintenance plans have they go with these, if you’re considering maintenance plan with this then yet you’ll get a lot of benefits and a lot of value, and that will be explained more on the maintenance page.