Why pay a premium price for managed hosting when you can use a bulk hosting provider at a fraction of the cost? On the surface, it seems like an easy way to save some money every month. In this quick blog post, I’m going to explain why this mindset will most likely be a fatal mistake and possibly damage your business and reputation.
According to this Forbes article, over 30,000 hacked websites are identified each and every day. Furthermore, with computing power getting cheaper by the day, this number is only going to grow.
When you think of someone hacking your website, you might picture some bad guy sitting at his laptop manually analyzing your website to see how he can get into it. This is quite far from the truth. In fact, most websites are hacked via malicious bots or programs that have been designed to surf the internet looking for specific vulnerabilities to take advantage of. If you’re not submerged in the technology industry, that may seem like a bunch of hooey, but it’s not. Most likely, your attacker is waking up to his cup of coffee and checking to see how many websites he gained access to the night prior.
You might be thinking, “why would someone hack my little website, they have nothing to gain from it.” Wrong, they have everything to gain. Here are just a few reasons an attacker may hack your site:
- Defacing – That’s right, the equivalent of graffiti on a wall, many attackers want to gain notoriety by placing their preformatted web page and graphics on your domain.
- Cryptocurrency mining – Your website sits on a server that has resources to spare, gaining access to your website and using your server’s resources to mine for cryptocurrency is a way for your attacker to make some money.
- Redirecting Traffic – This one can go unnoticed for quite some time depending on the method. One method that I see happen often is an HTACCESS edit that redirects all of the traffic that hits your site from Google to their spammy and most likely inappropriate website. This one can be quite damaging to your reputation and put your visitors at serious risk as they are redirected to websites that your attacker has full control of or is an affiliate of.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Just as you want to rank highly in Google, so do the bad guys pushing their spammy and or illegal services. This one often involves gaining access to your website to inject backlinks to their website and or inject thousands of spammy website pages into your website.
- Botnet – What if your server was involved in attacks on other major companies? It’s quite possible and it happens all of the time. Once attackers hijack your website or server, they can use it to deploy brute force attacks, denial of service attacks, and much more.
Those are just a few reasons why you and anyone else with a website can become a target. If you’d like to learn more about the types of attacks that happen every day, check out this article by Securi.
In short, if your website is hacked and goes unnoticed by you or your webmaster for any length of time, Google will most likely spot it and penalize your website. This will most likely result in your website being completely removed from their index. If this happens, you can say goodbye to your website traffic and leads, and your business will most likely suffer.
Want to handle it yourself?
If you’re still not convinced that managed hosting is the way to go, I’d recommend, at a minimum, taking the following steps:
- Install and configure the Wordfence plugin, run some scans and fix any warnings.
- Read a few articles on how to harden WordPress security and implement what you can.
Don’t want the worries and headaches of managing a WordPress website? Let BlueSoft handle it for you by contacting us here.
