If your website gets hacked in the evening or weekend, will your hosting company or your website agency be there for you? Or will you get a message saying they will look at it during regular office hours?
Last night we had a luxury hotel that came under sustained attack, the result being they lost control of their website. They found themselves locked out and that their home page was now the doorway to spam downloads.
The website had a premium WordFence security Plugin already in place, but still, it was compromised. Wordfence, when contacted, said they would look at the issue in the morning for a fee of $125!
The hackers had covered their tracks well, and it looked like they had got in via another user account. They had then added additional scripts and set up a ring of protection for themselves.
With the client getting inundated with worried guests and the concern that Google could quickly blacklist them for Spam they got in touch. It was 11.30 pm.
We had a look at the log files on the server and could see suspicious activity had taken place in the previous 24 hours. We quickly decided to roll the website back seven days, including the Database and all files.
Within 30 mins we back in the website.
With this done, we quickly logged in and changed all the passwords and installed two-factor authentification protocols using separate phone apps. Our IT support team then monitored the website through the night. IP addresses were blacklisted, plugins checked and by 1.30 am; everything was fine with any website changes back in place.
By the time the client came back in this morning, everything was back online and working.
I have mentioned many times that some people are surprised that we also offer website hosting. It was never our intention in the beginning but having worked with so many client websites that were underperforming due to cheap shared hosting or had dire support. We started to offer our own.
Our dedicated servers are hosted in the UK, and our IT support is available 24/7 365 days per year. We run a dedicated high-performance server that can text us if someone even looks at it the wrong way!
Your website is at the centre of your online world, imagine what you would do if you lost it all and had to start again? With Genius Loci Media we are already ahead of you, with daily backups kept for a rolling seven days, together with monthly backups kept offsite on separate servers.
- As you read this are all your plugins up to date?
- Are all of your Plugins still valid?
- Are you running the latest version of WordPress?
- When was the last time you updated your passwords?
Do you even have time to even think about these issues?
Our solution is you won’t need to as our approach is to let you get back to what you do best, while we do the rest.
Phil Aston
Find out more about our hosting packages or call +44(0)1736 719342
