What kind of security does your website need?

Security is that layer to stop nasty things happening to your website, be it multiple submissions of forms, to general attacks on a website that might bring it down.

Even the most amazing hosting, can be hit with attacks.  ie.  if you had a single lane road and pumped a lot of vehicles down it, you get a jam.  Try that on the A14 dual carriage way, and increase the vehicles, you get a jam.

What if you have more power to your hosting?

Try it on a 3 or 4 lane highway, it’s better.  But then pump even more vehicles down it, you get a jam.  So you could have a huge powerful server, that costs you a mint, and still it could be hit, as attackers use more and more smart ways to “fill up your bandwidth”.

So what’s the answer?

We have had experience of all levels of this.  From sites just getting some nasty traffic that certain plugins help with, that just stop it at the site level.  For the most part, this is what you need.  Cloudflare^® offers a free means of protection against Bots that are not “real people”, but just tools that try to scrap over your site.  Or if your IP is hidden with Cloudflare^®, it can help too.

It use to be that you might get an IP or user that hits your site 1000s of times in a moment, and that IP is spotted and stopped.  But they are getting smarter; often not with just one IP address.

Experience of changing IPs

We recall years ago a client of ours had his website taken down by something that had the IP constantly changing, and they just couldn’t stop it.  This was before CF got more and more clever.

Today, we have websites that have standard security on it, as they are less targetted.  We have others that have tools to stop people hitting filters too often.  I mean how many times do you click size, then colour then whatever, on a Commerce website?  Bots do this so very quickly!  So we have tools to help alleviate this.

But even then, it can get more smart and need a higher level of help.  Cloudflare^® has multiple levels of security tiers.  Their Pro tier is quite cool, as it even allows them to effectively be the HOST in a way.  So the server is never “whacked” as such, and CF has the means to handle it all.

Some hosts have tools that add a layer of “i’m not a robot” to users.  This will stop that sort of bad traffic right in it’s tracks, but it’s not a solution as Google doesn’t like it.  So you need something that Google knows about and works with, while stopping the really bad traffic from getting through.

We don’t of course reveal here all that we do to help our clients.  But needless to say, we try to step on anything that comes in that is bad, and look at ways to get it stopped as quickly as possible, so uptime is what one would expect.

Use our WordPress Security

If you have any issues with WordPress Security, do get in touch.  We can talk you through various levels we can install, from free ones, to those that may cost £20 or upwards.