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Security is critically important for any website, and doubly so for any business website. It isn’t just ecommerce sites that need to worry about security, either. Though financial transactions have their own special set of concerns, any website that collects even basic information about users (name, email address) needs to take security precautions with how that data is handled. Additionally, even the most non-commercial sites (personal blogs, small non-profit groups) can be at risk for viruses, spam, and other malicious activity. Hosting companies offer a range of security features, but it is ultimately your responsibility as a website owner or manager to ensure that your website is properly secured. This is something you want to think about from the very beginning, not added in as an afterthought.
Common Security Features of Web Hosting Plans
SSL Certificates
SSL — Secure Sockets Layer — is a form of encryption that creates a secure connection between a website and a visitor. It is essential for any form of private data transfer, like entering Credit Card numbers into a shopping cart form.
Additionally, Google has recently announced that websites using SSL encryption will receive a slight rankings increase over sites that do not.
For SSL encryption to work properly with web browsers, a website owner must obtain an SSL certificate from a Certificate Authority.
Most web hosting companies have partnered with a Certificate Authority in order to provide SSL certificates as part of the web hosting package, with automatic setup.
Usually, SSL Certificates require a dedicated IP address.
SSL related security features:
Shared SSL — Shared hosting plan providers often, but not always, provide a single SSL certificate that is shared by all customers sharing the hosting server.
Private SSL — Some shared hosting plan providers allow users to add a private, or dedicated, SSL certificate to their plans for an additional fee. Usually this requires a separate purchase of a dedicated IP address.
Proxy SSL Encryption — This is an advanced feature used to provide SSL encryption into a private network from outside the network. A single server acts as a proxy for other servers inside the network, and provides a layer of SSL security.
Sender ID
Sender ID is an email anti-spoofing protocol similar to Sender Policy Framework (SPF), with several improvements.
Using Sender ID ensures that spoofed email which is sent masquerading as if it came from your domain will not be misattributed to you. This helps others filter out spam email and also helps your legitimate email from being blacklisted.
ASPSecured
ASPSecured is a module available for the ASP (Active Server Pages) programming language.
TRUSTe
TRUSTe is a Data Privacy Management Platform, comprising a suite of related tools for ensuring data privacy and communicating that security to your customers.
Firewall Protection
A firewall is a hardware or software system which blocks certain types of traffic. In a web hosting environment, requests are blocked either because of their origin or their content.
Most shared hosting plans include basic firewall protection, but it usually cannot be customized because the firewall is shared by all customers. If an IP address is blocked for one customer, it is blocked for all. More problematic — it an IP address is white listed for one customer, it is white listed for all.
For this reason, some website owners need a dedicated firewall. Depending on the hosting company, this may require a VPS (Virtual Private Server) plan, or it may be possible to add it to a shared hosting plan that has a dedicated IP address.
Hotlink Protection
Generally, your media assets for your website are accessed as part of a larger set of requests for your entire website.
However, it is possible for someone to embed an asset (usually an image) on their website by pointing directly to your file in the source code of their website. This allows them to use your content, possibly without your permission. This is called “Hotlinking.”
This may be bad for two reasons. First, you may not want someone else using your content — in which case, they may be infringing on your copyright. Secondly, when the image is loaded from your server by another website, it is using your bandwidth. If you pay for bandwidth, of if the linking site is very popular, this can cause problems for you.
Hotlink protection disallows this from happening.
IP Deny Manager
If you are using a firewall, you may need to be able to manually add or remove certain IP addresses from being blocked. This requires an IP Deny Manager tool.
Snapshot Backups
One of the most important security considerations is frequent backups. No matter what precautions you take, there is always a risk that something will happen to compromise or corrupt your data.
A snapshot backup will allow you to restore the files and database on your server as it was at a particular time in the past. Usually, a series of snapshots are saved, so that you can restore to some specific point. This is important because if you always delete the old backups as new ones are made, you may end up not having backups from the period before the problem began.
