Webhost Integrity
Not all web hosts setup and manage their servers at the same level. Think about all of the property management companies in the world – do all of them operate with the same level of integrity? Now, imagine a world where there are few building codes or laws about how to manage that infrastructure. That’s the world we live in when it comes to web servers. It’s still very early days for this young industry.
Because all web hosts are different, our team of experts are familiar with the latest protocols as well as some out-dated and deprecated technology that some web hosts still use. Either way, we can help you move your site to a new web server to ensure you have the absolute best security and performance for your WordPress website.
We are not a hosting company per se. We work with some of the leading webhosts on earth. Therein, we only recommend and use hosting companies that keep their software and hardware up to date. We insist on it and will discontinue using hosting companies that fall behind or get sloppy with maintaining their infrastructure.
We will ensure your webhost uses encryption, called TLS or SSL, to prevent the information that is being transmitted to and from your site from being intercepted by third parties. Not only is this a security essential that we setup for all of our clients, but it’s also a ranking factor for Google. So, it’s a no-brainer and if your current host doesn’t offer this, it’s a pretty strong indication that you are using a low-end plan or provider.
We have a service in place to monitor the up-time of WordPress websites. If a site goes offline for a certain number of minutes, we automatically get an alert which allows us to take action (often before you or any of your clients/customers even know there is a problem). The level of discretion of uptime monitoring varies from a 15-minute threshold to a 1-minute threshold depending on the level of plan you have in place with WordZite.
Sometimes the hosting company isn’t sloppy, but the staff member(s) accessing the web server have been. It’s not uncommon for us to discover that internal staff or 3rd party suppliers have created custom folders or files with the WordPress directories or in the root directory of the web server itself. We work with our top-tier clients to host required custom scripts on a different server or we completely remove unneeded scripts from the site. This mitigates potential security or performance problems associated with having custom code or ad hoc databases on the same server as your WordPress website.
Lastly, we monitor the web server resources. We review the amount of space a website takes up on the web server. We also monitor how much computing power and memory our clients’ sites are using. Higher than average usage over a given period will trigger a security audit to ensure the site is not experiencing a DDoS attack or other threat. We also keep server and PHP logs so that we can review the during any cyber events to help trace or identify the source of potential threats or performance issues.
