Your website is a business asset, so just like any other valuable asset, it’s attractive to criminals. Also like any other asset, it needs to be protected.
Because the internet is abstract, it’s hard to grasp how real online threats to your website are, but according to Forbes 30,000 websites are hacked a day and most of those belong to small businesses like yours. That’s a website hacked every 3 seconds!
Here are some other statistics based on WhiteHat Security’s 2013 report:
- 86% of all websites had at least one serious vulnerability
- The average website has 56 vulnerabilities
- Serious vulnerabilities took almost 200 days to resolve
Crazy, right? A hacked website could wreak havoc on your business. Not only will you lose your customers’ trust, but hacked website are removed from Google’s index to protect visitors. Think about how hard you worked to rank in Google just to see it thrown away by some hacker.
To protect yourself make sure you use business-class website hosting that takes security seriously. Cheap hosting for a couple dollars a month just won’t cut it. It may be enough for an unimportant personal blog, but it’s not enough for your business!
To see if a website host is secure enough ask what security measures they have in place (see ours here) and whether they offer a security guarantee to protect you. For example, we use firewalls, malware scanning, and automatically update your site to proactively block even the newest attacks. We also have a 100% security guarantee.
Find out what your host is doing to protect your asset, your business website.
Technology changes fast. Are you keeping up?
We all know how quickly technology changes. Between hardware upgrades, software updates, and compatibility with new mobile devices it seems impossible to keep your website up to date.
If you use a website hosting company they’ll take care of the hardware updates for you and the managed hosting companies will also make sure the servers are up to date. But even with all that, there’s still more work to do.
Regardless of what software you use to run your website, it needs to be updated often. In fact, out of date software is the #1 reason websites get hacked.
This is particularly true for WordPress, the most popular website software in the world. It’s amazing software and it powers over 20% of the internet (around 80 million websites). But because it’s so popular it’s a big target for hackers. WordPress itself is very secure, but only if the software, themes, and all the plugins are up to date also. Is your website up to date?
So what can you do to make sure your website is up to date? You should check it often for updates. If you’d rather not do it yourself you could hire someone, but that gets expensive. The easiest way is to use a website host that manages all maintenance and updates for you like we do for our customers.
This kind of all-in-one website hosting is getting more popular. It’s a little more expensive, but it’s worth the investment. Not only is it expensive to fix a hacked website (it’s costs hundreds of dollars to fix even a small website), but being removed from the search rankings is even more expensive and costs companies millions in lost sales every year. So when you look at the numbers, a managed host that does it all for you is a bargain. Besides, how much is peace of mind worth?