{"id":254,"date":"2014-03-11T16:49:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-11T16:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/?p=254"},"modified":"2014-03-11T12:19:50","modified_gmt":"2014-03-11T12:19:50","slug":"preventing-sites-being-hacked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/preventing-sites-being-hacked.html","title":{"rendered":"Preventing sites being hacked"},"content":{"rendered":"

The last couple of days have been pretty interesting in a weird kind of way.<\/p>\n

I often\u00a0look at my\u00a0phone or ipad to\u00a0keep track of what’s going on with the various websites we manage.\u00a0 On Sunday night\u00a0I had a look at my phone as I was about to turn in for the night and I got a bit of a shock.\u00a0 I had 8000 emails.\u00a0 Yes 8000 and it was going up rapidly.\u00a0 This not surprisingly set off alarm bells.\u00a0 It turned out that one of the sites we mange was being attacked!<\/p>\n

Now if this has never happened to you, then it can be a scary thing.\u00a0 Suddenly people are trying to break into your site and you don’t know how to stop them or what to do about it.\u00a0 If this has never happened to you, you won’t have experienced the standard response of a web hosting company.\u00a0 For many their only solution is to take the site off line and hope that the attack stops.\u00a0 Some do go further and introduce more blocking but in general there isn’t much they can do.\u00a0\u00a0 Now I don’t know about you but I think this is a pretty poor response.\u00a0 If you get a website you want it to work and you don’t want to worry about hacking and other technical stuff you want to focus on building content for people to read.\u00a0 So when I set up Websites4Christians I was determined that we’d do better!\u00a0 So we don’t just supply hosting we provide a managed website service.<\/p>\n

When it comes to Christian websites and indeed any website most site owners don’t have the time to learn the technical stuff to protect the site.\u00a0 Moreover they often don’t want to.\u00a0 They just want a site that gives them a place to put up information for visitors.\u00a0 But the reality is that websites need managed and updated.\u00a0 Think of it like the windows software on your computer of OS on the Mac.\u00a0 It needs updated regularly.\u00a0 This protects it from malicious hacks and helps to make sure it’s working correctly at all times.\u00a0 Your website is just the same it needs updating to protect it and keep it up to date.\u00a0 When you’re sold hosting they don’t mention this because most companies don’t provide that aspect.\u00a0 They assume you’ll do it.\u00a0 However my experience is that most people don’t have the time and often don’t have the skill needed.<\/p>\n

\"siteAttacksGraph\"<\/a>So at Websites4Christians we provide that service as part of the package.\u00a0 Extra security software and on-going updates to help protect your site.\u00a0 I won’t detail here all the things we do but they include blocking hacking attacks and backing up on a regular basis the software.\u00a0 We also have methods of dealing with attacks when they occur – as the sadly do.<\/p>\n

The upshot of all this is that when I got the 8000 email detailing the attack I was pretty relaxed.\u00a0 I knew that our software would have protected the site and that although there was stuff to do there was no disaster looming.\u00a0 In the end the hacker gave up at around the 23,000 attacks level.\u00a0 I guess the went to prey on another site that was less protected.\u00a0 I’ve included a copy of the graph that shows the attacks on the left.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The last couple of days have been pretty interesting in a weird kind of way. I often\u00a0look at my\u00a0phone or ipad to\u00a0keep track of what’s going on with the various websites we manage.\u00a0 On Sunday night\u00a0I had a look at my phone as I was about to turn in for the night and I got […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[20,19,17,18],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":256,"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions\/256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}