A few months back we switched to Siteground from our previous host - and thank god, we're never looking back! Here are 5 reasons why we think Siteground and their hackalert monitoring is awesome!
1. SiteGround HackAlert monitoring - checks the state of your website for hacking
The biggest way you can get egg on your face is if your site gets hacked and you end up serving malware to your customers rather than the product/service they came looking for.
Siteground Hackalert monitoring has technology which can monitor your website and ensure it is clean of any malware and alert you if your site gets hacked. They will also help you clean it if something happens - but even just knowing about it is really important for your reputation.
HackAlert monitoring makes sure you don't get caught off guard by doing an analysis of your website in the background. If they detect files and patterns which are synonymous with hacking, they will send you an alert. Infact, you will get a weekly email with the status of the Hackalert monitoring review of your website's files.
Of course, it would be better to implement security to prevent hacking in the first place. This is what we do with CollectiveRay.
Is HackAlert worth it?
So you might be wondering, should I actually increase the price of my web hosting service with the Hackalert monitoring service? Let's go through a few thoughts.
- The price of HackAlert is only $1/month. What that means that over the course of a year, you are just going to add $12 to your hosting to improve your website's security significantly. You are making sure your site does not get hacked and we believe this is worth much more than this. Looking at other services you'll find that many of them are going to cost even MORE than the monitoring
- You want to know IMMEDIATELY about any tampering with your site. If your site has been attacked and hacked, the last thing you want is to leave your site in a hacked state. Besides the fact that somebody already has control of your site, the likelihood is that the same site is going to get exploited further. You quickly want to put a stop to that and FIX any problems asap. With a weekly email alert, you'll get to know in an average of 3 days if your site has been tampered with.
- The cost of not having HackAlert is much higher - let's say your site gets hacked and you don't immediately notice (most hack attacks are subtle - they need your website to remain hacked so they will hide themselves). What can happen is this. Your site starts sending SPAM and your domain and server get blacklisted. Your site overwhelms the server with malicious traffic and your site gets shutdown. Your site is marked as unsafe by Google and people get a warning in their browsers not to visit your site. Recovering from any of these problems is going to cost you MUCH MORE than $12.
Do I need HackAlert Malware Monitoring?
We strongly believe that you are better safe than sorry. HackAlert Malware Monitoring makes sure that you are not left in the blind. The good thing about SiteGround is that they already have lots of good security practices in place, but these are not fail-safe. You need all of the protection your website can get.
We get HackAlert Malware Monitoring with each site that we host on SiteGround, because really and truly - there is nothing to lose and much to gain.
2. Joomla! and WordPress auto-updates
Keeping track of new releases is not always feasible. Even if you are able to keep up to date with the releases, if you administer a large number of sites, updating all of them take time and effort.
Siteground's awesome "Joomla! Auto-update" and "Wordpress Auto-update" tool monitors new releases of Joomla! and WordPress and automatically updates your website site as soon as a new release is out.
So no longer do you need to be scared of missing any security releases - you are covered.
3. Joomla! (and WordPress) is fast
Siteground has specifically tuned their servers to be able to make Joomla and WordPress fast.
They also have multiple levels of caching which ensure that even if your site is getting heavy traffic - it will withstand the pressure.
Their SuperCacher technology uses Varnish Static cache for stuff such as CSS and images, Varnish Dynamic cache for all your dynamic content coming from the database, and Memcached which is the ultimate level of caching. Check out our own results powered by SiteGround!
4. Do your testing on a staging server
Who has never experienced the pain of doing some testing on their live site and breaking it in the process due to some incompatibility?
I know I'm guilty of that myself *embarrassed*
SiteGround helps prevent this by providing a 1-click staging server. This is essentially a copy of your live website which is used for testing purposes. You can do your changes of the staging server, once you confirm that all is ok, you can push these changes to the live site - AUTOMATICALLY - how cool is that?
5. Great Joomla! and WordPress specific support
The biggest pain in the behind is when your site goes down and you have no idea why - whilst your hosting server will blame it on Joomla! This is something which you will not experience with Siteground.
They have a lot of Joomla! gurus on their support staff and they WILL resolve any of your problems if and when they happen without shying away from anything Joomla
We're hosted on SiteGround because we care about our website, and we're recommending them because we truly think everybody should too. Websites hosting on them load faster, their servers are safer, Hackalert monitoring keeps your site clean and their support is better (they do have to metrics to prove these bold claims).
Why don't you do like us and give SiteGround a try? You won't have to worry about moving your site, they will do it for you for free. We guarantee you'll never want to go back to your old host. Your first 30 days are on them, so you don't even have to pay them a cent if you don't like what you see ;)
HackAlert monitoring review - what is it and why you should get it
As webmasters and web designers, HackAlert Monitoring can solve of one of our lurking fears - that which we visit our website or sites we have developed and find, that they have been hacked, defaced, or worse than that, that they are distributing malware.
This would leave a very bad impression on our work, and sometimes it's hard to know if there has been a compromise on some page or component which we have forgotten about.
Is your site fully protected against this - here is how HackAlert monitoring can help you like it's been helping our site stay secure!
This is what is called a drive-by download - a technique where hackers inject malicious code into your website without your knowledge which is then used to infect other visitors of your site.
Moreover, it is possible that your website becomes a partner in crime by being the "provider" of malware and traffic from vulnerable machines is sent to your site to get infected.
For your website's visitor, the problem can be that their personal information is stolen, such as financial data including online banking credentials and credit card details.
Personal information stolen in this manner also could lead to taking over of email accounts, malicious access to social networks, and in many cases, full-blown identity theft.
HackAlert monitoring and Google blacklists
Another huge issue that is created if your website is hacked, is that Google will very quickly detect that your website has been compromised by malware.
As soon as this happens, Google will immediately delist your site and post a huge warning to any visiting users, that if they visit your website they are likely to get infected by malware. Of course - this will create serious repercussions, on your website and your business.
At the very least, you will see a drastic drop in traffic to your website, and of course with that comes a bad reputation that your website will infect visitor's computers.
Hackalert monitoring solves all this - by silently monitoring our website in the background to check if our site has been tampered with or been compromised.
The SiteGround Hackalert monitoring service is essentially a service which scans all the files of our website and checks whether they contain any suspicious looking files.
It looks for particular patterns, especially those which are typically used by hackers to hide their malicious code. If it finds any of these types of files, the web malware monitoring and detection service will report that your site is not clean.
The service is completely cloud-based and powered by GlobalSign, one of the leading security providers.
HackAlert monitoring benefits - how it keeps your site clean
HackAlert by SiteGround scans files on your websites even for the latest and freshest zero-day malware. The good thing is that you don't have to do anything at all, your job is to just sit back and relax and let the Hackalert monitoring service do all the dirty work.
You don't need to install anything if you are a SiteGround user, you just need to activate the service on your domain.
HackAlert Monitoring - only one of the many ways SiteGround keeps your site secure.
At SiteGround, they take the security of your site very seriously. We've already mentioned all the reasons how a malware infection negatively impacts your site, so let's get to how you can rest easy with SiteGround.
How SiteGround keeps your website secure from hack attacks
Automatic WordPress and Joomla Updates
You probably know that one of the biggest risks your website is exposed to is when your WordPress or Joomla is not updated to the latest versions. When you don't update your sites fast enough, it's very easy to fall victim to a hacking attack.
With SiteGround you don't have to worry about updating your site to keep it protected. As soon as a new version is released, a SiteGround scripts automatically backups your site and then upgrades it to the latest version - without you ever having to lift a finger or think about it.
Security Team + Specific Firewall Rules against 0-day exploits and attacks
Hacking attacks create problems not just for the owners of websites and their visitors.
These owners create very serious issues for the hosting company where these sites are hosted. Due to this, SiteGround has a web security team who are always on the alert for any new fresh attacks which have been released.
Besides implementing all the above-mentioned web security measures - they also do something very specific. When a new attack is discovered, they configure their firewall (which protects all servers), to stop any hack using the fresh attack code. So EVEN if your site has not already been updated, anybody trying to crack your website is going to get stopped by the SiteGround firewall rule.
If all else fails - Automatic Daily Backups
There's always that occasion when something has gone wrong, and things have gone belly up. Despite the Hackalert monitoring, the updates, the firewall rules, something might still happen to your site. Maybe you forgot to harden the site or change the password to a secure password, or you forgot the change file permissions to the correct permissions and your site got hacked anyway.
Recommended Reading: 10 tips for your website's security
The great thing is that SiteGround takes daily backups of your files and databases - so for those cases when despite all protections, something failed on your site and you need to revert to a backup, you're still safely protected.
Go on - do like we do and rest safely knowing your site is protected. Give SiteGround a free 30-day trial - transfers from your current host are free.
Please leave a useful comment with your thoughts, then share this on your Facebook group(s) who would find this useful and let's reap the benefits together. Thank you for sharing and being nice!
Disclosure: This page may contain links to external sites for products which we love and wholeheartedly recommend. If you buy products we suggest, we may earn a referral fee. Such fees do not influence our recommendations and we do not accept payments for positive reviews.
and many more ...