Wordpress is a fantastic tool that helped bring blogging, advanced site capabilities (like shopping carts, subscription services and web communities) and more to the masses. Wordpress is extremely popular and I'm still surprised sometimes by the places I find being run on a Wordpress site/platform.
All that success comes with a cost however: Security.
To be fair, it's not so much that Wordpress is somehow less secure than it's peers but more that Wordpress has succeeded it's way into being among the largest and most sought after targets on the Internets. So chances are if you're running a wordpress site, at some point one of the bad guys is gonna find you and if you're not prepared, you're not going to be having a good day. The whole week might not be so great if I'm being really honest.
So....
How does one prepare?
Rule #1 (just like in ALL things computer), have a good backup.
Backups are essential, and if/when absolute disaster strikes, only a good backup will save your soul (and save your butt, and save your hair, and save your marriage, and a whole bunch of other stuff..)
Take frequent backups.
Download them OFF of your server to your local PC (or an external hard drive or NAS) and store them safely.
Keep many copies dating back significant time - these are the safety net of your digital livelihood.
Now, if you have an active site or a frequently changing site, a backup is still a necessity but restoring it is still going to disrupt the world a bit.
If your reason for restoring is a hack or malware infection, a backup will get you back to a clean state for sure but it's not going to stop you from being hacked/intruded upon again if you don't fix the source of the problem or don't know the problem's there.
Enter Sucuri. Sucuri is a security firm specializing in these matters with a number of interesting products to help manage, recover, mitigate and even circumvent these things from ever happening in the first place.
Sucuri's Monitoring and Cleaning service will help you recover from an infection that already happened as well as keep you safe with the insurance that if it happens again, a highly skilled professional will clean it up for you again. This service is an incredible deal at under $100 for the year.
Sucuri also has a Cloud protection product which is basically a Web Application Firewall (WAF) that can protect your installation from ever seeing the attacks in the first place. This also has the added benefit of being a CDN or edge-caching infrastructure which will speed up your site to visitors world-wide as well as a few other nifty features. Ranging from about $10 to as much as $75 a month, the Cloud protection service is not cheap and not necessarily for every site/user but if you NEED to ensure uptime and continuity, this is an absolutely necessary piece of your puzzle.
Hit this link to check out their offerings or get in touch with us if you're looking for someone to host your site or just help out with the management of it.
We'd love to hear from you.
To be fair, it's not so much that Wordpress is somehow less secure than it's peers but more that Wordpress has succeeded it's way into being among the largest and most sought after targets on the Internets. So chances are if you're running a wordpress site, at some point one of the bad guys is gonna find you and if you're not prepared, you're not going to be having a good day. The whole week might not be so great if I'm being really honest.
So....
How does one prepare?
Rule #1 (just like in ALL things computer), have a good backup.
Backups are essential, and if/when absolute disaster strikes, only a good backup will save your soul (and save your butt, and save your hair, and save your marriage, and a whole bunch of other stuff..)
Take frequent backups.
Download them OFF of your server to your local PC (or an external hard drive or NAS) and store them safely.
Keep many copies dating back significant time - these are the safety net of your digital livelihood.
Now, if you have an active site or a frequently changing site, a backup is still a necessity but restoring it is still going to disrupt the world a bit.
If your reason for restoring is a hack or malware infection, a backup will get you back to a clean state for sure but it's not going to stop you from being hacked/intruded upon again if you don't fix the source of the problem or don't know the problem's there.
Enter Sucuri. Sucuri is a security firm specializing in these matters with a number of interesting products to help manage, recover, mitigate and even circumvent these things from ever happening in the first place.
Sucuri's Monitoring and Cleaning service will help you recover from an infection that already happened as well as keep you safe with the insurance that if it happens again, a highly skilled professional will clean it up for you again. This service is an incredible deal at under $100 for the year.
Sucuri also has a Cloud protection product which is basically a Web Application Firewall (WAF) that can protect your installation from ever seeing the attacks in the first place. This also has the added benefit of being a CDN or edge-caching infrastructure which will speed up your site to visitors world-wide as well as a few other nifty features. Ranging from about $10 to as much as $75 a month, the Cloud protection service is not cheap and not necessarily for every site/user but if you NEED to ensure uptime and continuity, this is an absolutely necessary piece of your puzzle.
Hit this link to check out their offerings or get in touch with us if you're looking for someone to host your site or just help out with the management of it.
We'd love to hear from you.
