What you should know about website hosting

WordPress is a widely used content management system (CMS) that enables people to create, edit and manage websites in a way that provides a good user experience and is highly functional and relevant to the business.

The majority of websites on the internet are powered by WordPress. At KH Digital, WordPress is our preferred choice of platform to build your site from, as it’s a framework that offers a multitude of themes, plugins, and flexibility to continue developing your site in the future.

By having your site hosted you are eliminating the need to invest in a powerful and secure server, instead you are renting server space for your website to live on.

An example of how important it is to have a secure hosting system can be seen from the recent GoDaddy data breach that happened in September 2021. This was a mass breach that affected over one million of their customers and went unnoticed for nearly two months. Research into the cause for the breach has indicated that it was due to inadequate security that did not meet industry standards.

Examples of the data exposed by customers using the compromised provisioning system are:

• Email addresses
• Customer number and contact details
• WordPress Administrator Passwords
• Database usernames and passwords

GoDaddy said that they have since reset all the passwords for the affected customers. However, any of the affected sites should have full security checks as they may have become infected by malicious files. GoDaddy have only confirmed that they have reset passwords, they have not said anything about scanning for malicious scripts or removing rogue administrator accounts.

Web host and domain name registrars that often spring to mind when a person needs a website is GoDaddy. Companies such as this spend a lot of money in marketing to encourage users to buy the domain name and hosting as a complete package on their systems. They are often marketed as highly appealing as many of their customers do not actually understand the technicalities of what they are purchasing.

For example, many customers do not own their websites. They are built and hosted on GoDaddy. If something was to happen to this company or if it faced major technical issues then these customers would lose their websites. It can also be very difficult to access your own website. If you decide in the future that you want your site redesigned or would like to install new features such as a shopping cart, then your developer will have to interact with your server provider to make these changes. This can cause issues between what work can be completed and can increase how long and difficult the process becomes (which can also make changes very expensive).

To keep a site performing at its best it requires monitoring and updating of plugins to retain functionality and security. Some updates happen automatically which can affect the function of the elements on your page and overall site usability.

With a WordPress maintenance and hosting service, the company you choose will oversee these updates for you and provide ongoing support to you and your website. Our support team will help keep on top of updates so that your themes, plugins, and WordPress itself is kept up to date, and should any problems arise, they can be fixed and managed.

Ongoing website maintenance takes the stress out of setting up your site and looking after its upkeep. Keeping your website up to date and secure can be very technical to understand and time consuming, particularly if you are unsure. By investing in this service, you then have time to concentrate on selling your products and creating high quality content, rather than the often complicated technical aspects of web development.

Websites are often targeted by malware and trojans so it’s important to have ways to detect and remove threats, have highly efficient security protection, and to have regular backups to help restore information and missing elements.

There are different types of hosting packages that offer different benefits, for example, managed hosting means the host will manage the operation, security and take care of your site. Whereas shared hosting stores your site on the same server as others, this tends to be less expensive but is only suited for consistently lower traffic sites.