Most people are familiar with email viruses and the need for protecting a personal computer against infection. But what are you doing to ensure the safety and security of your website? Most often, business owners leave this side of things up to their web designers and web hosting company. But how do you know that what they are doing is enough to protect your website and business? Let’s look at a few basic things regarding web hosting security that you need to know about.

What Cyber Criminals Are Doing

Hackers and cyber criminals really don’t have a conscience; they aren’t worried that they may be destroying your business or livelihood. Sometimes it is just a game to them to see if they can access and destroy the information held on your website. Other times, they may be after your customer data or business information so they can commit fraud and make online purchases with your customers’ credit cards. They do this by planting malicious code into your website. This code can then run undetected while they harvest the information they want. This is usually referred to as spyware, malware, trojan horses and key loggers. If your website is not protected against these programs, you could find yourself becoming a virtual victim to these hackers.

What Part Does Your Web Hosting Provider Play?

Many business owners will tell you that while they have some basic knowledge about combating spyware and malware, they do not have the time to keep up to date with all the latest information. This is understandable. You have a business to run which involves keeping customers happy. However, you can never afford to just ignore the problem. One of your best options is to make sure that your web hosting providers are the experts. Check with them regarding what protection methods they have on the servers to ensure your website’s security. Make sure that the programs they are using are verified in the computer industry and that they are run on a basis where they receive regular daily updates.

Protecting Your Website Content

The most common way that information is uploaded onto a website is through FTP, also known as File Transfer Protocol. While this is the most widely used method of uploading information, it is not particularly secure. Hackers can intercept the transfer, and add, delete or change information. They then send it on its way to your website without you even being aware of it. They could put malicious code into the content which could capture your business or company details, depending on the nature of your site. Even the content of your website is valuable. No doubt you took many hours to write it so you will want to protect it. A more secure way of transferring information is known as SFTP. It is a similar protocol to FTP except that it has added security features so the transfer cannot be accessed by hackers as easily.

Protecting Your Customers’ Information

If you have an ecommerce site, it is absolutely essential that you make use of SSL to protect your customer information. SSL is known as Secure Sockets Layer. What this does is encode and hide information such as customers’ credit card numbers, customers’ billing addresses and other pertinent information. If you do not have this in place on your website, you are leaving your customers vulnerable to identity theft and credit card fraud. Hackers are pretty efficient when it comes to getting their hands on that information if it is not encoded. They could be making purchases online and using your customers’ credit cards long before they become aware of it. If you run an e-commerce site, make sure that your hosting provider has SSL. In addition, they should be able to provide you with an SSL certificate which you can place on your website to show customers you have a secure website for them to transact on.

How Diligent Is Your Hosting Provider About Website Security?

Any good web hosting provider will know how essential it is to have good security. Hackers are constantly coming up with creative new ways to access your website information and send out viruses. No hosting provider can afford to be anything but proactive in their approach to combating cyber criminals. If when speaking to your hosting provider, you get the impression that they are not terribly concerned about keeping up-to-date security measures then it is time to look around for another hosting provider. They should be the experts and able to provide you with the latest protection available.

Webstyles is currently creating an application for users to save their hosting account details once and automatically login and manage email accounts,login to Cpanel, upload files, get live chat support, log support tickets or access the knowledge base. Gone are the days of opening an email to find a url and your possible expired password and user-name. Support for multiple domains will also be available shortly and will provide a clients who are new to hosting an easy way to manage their essential domain functions.

We plan to have a stable version by end of February

And if the demand is high will offer it to all cpanel Users Early March 2010

Please Reply to this post with any additional features you would like to see in future builds

Usually when someone contacts me online, one of the most frequent questions I get asked is this: “How do I find a good web host?” or “Which web host do you use?”

This is one of those essential things you will need in order to earn that online income. You will need a web site and you will need a web host – somewhere to place that web site.

Sure there are countless marketers who work without a site but most have at least one main site which acts as their online calling card; where people can find them on the web. Of course, you can always use the social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter… but that’s like operating your office out of Starbucks!

Instead, a well designed site is just more professional and business like. It also means you’re serious about your online business.

Picking a good web host is not easy. I have had numerous different web hosts over the years. Most of them have been very good and served their purpose, but I have had some bad experiences too – what long term webmaster or marketer hasn’t? Something always goes wrong eventually, especially if you have a lot of sites and many different web hosts.

Sometimes having a web host can be downright scary. Several years ago, the web host that I had my main site on was first sold and then went bankrupt. One day your site is running fine and the next day the web host is completely gone. Shut down. Your site and all your files completely gone. Vanished. Your host can’t be reached. Total blackout!

Fortunately, I had my site backed up on several systems and since that experience I always back my sites up on several computers and I go even further by copying them onto DVDs should those computers crash. If you have a site, I always suggest you back up your site files and make it redundant. The very worst can happen to you.

Overall quality and good 24/7 support should be your first objectives in choosing a good web host. You want a site that’s fast, easy to use, rarely down and has good support that you can reach at all times, should something go wrong.

You need to check exactly what features your web host is offering and for what price:

- How much storage space?
- Daily traffic limit or transfer?
- Email system? How many accounts…
- What type of server Linux or Windows?
- How many other sites will be sharing your IP address?
- Do You need SSL or a secure site?
- Are sites/files backed up? How often?
- What are the support hours?
- And of course the Price?

But don’t always try to get the cheapest price hosting, keep in mind, you always get what you pay for. A cheap web host won’t save you money if it’s a poor service and your site is always going down. So don’t always pick the cheapest web host.

Match up your hosting service with the type of site you will be running; a simple HTML site will have or make simple demands on your hosting service. So a shared hosting service may be quite adequate to meet your hosting needs. For SEO reasons, you should always check the location of your site, I have found which country your site is hosted in, plays a role in your rankings, especially in Google.

However, if you have a site that’s extremely interactive with forums, discussion groups, get large bursts of traffic or you’re running a lot of server-side scripts and programs – then you may need a more robust hosting service to meet your needs.

In this case, you might need a dedicated server to handle just your site. Many web hosts offer this service and it’s worth looking into if you have a site with extreme amounts of traffic or if you’re running forums, affiliate programs, email services… from your site. Most of my own sites are very simple and I have them on many different web hosts. Mainly because of my own experiences, I just don’t want to have all my sites on one host… the old “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” reasoning.

At the moment I am quite pleased with all my web hosts… many of my sites are on GoDaddy and I find them OK for simple sites like mine. I also find it convenient because they are also a domain registry so I can easily use them to buy my domains. Although many experts suggest you should always keep your domain registration separate from your hosting service because if your host should suddenly vanish, it is only a simple matter of moving your site to a different host. If your host controls your domain, this can be a major problem. Always keep control of your domain in your own hands, but you probably already knew that.

Another web host I use is Bluehost which is very good, can’t remember the last time my site was down. They are very popular with around a million sites and my only concern is that they may become too popular and their services will be spread too thin. However, I have had very few problems with them and you can always reach their support.

I also have a site with Ken Evoy’s SBI (Site Build It), but I created that one mainly to get access to the enormous resources connected with SBI. It is slightly more expensive than some of the ones listed above, but SBI is an overall online marketing system that in my opinion can’t be equaled on the web. Well, perhaps the Warriors group could give them a run for their money, but it’s the community of like-minded webmasters with SBI which makes it special. They are always ready and willing to help you out, doesn’t matter if you’re an experienced pro or a complete newcomer. Several years ago, I took a very close first-hand look at the hosting service provided by SBI. You can find my opinions/review on SBI located in the resource box below.

There are countless webhosts you can choose from when picking a web host. But do your homework, check around to the different forums and see how everyone is rating the web hosts they are using. First-hand experiences are the best judge of whether or not a web host is good and reliable.

Although moving a site from one web host to another can be a real pain, especially if you have a large scale site, but if you’re not totally satisfied with a web host and are having serious problems – simply change your hosting. Just make sure you’re not going from bad to worst.

Still, finding a good quality web host will be a major chore, no matter how you look at it.

Perhaps, in the final analysis, nothing beats checking with your friends and fellow webmasters you trust. Ask them which hosts they’re using and if they’re satisfied with it. Nothing beats first-hand experiences when it comes to choosing a web host. Just make sure you’re comparing oranges to oranges, that is: make sure you have similar site requirements as your webmaster friends. If you both have similar type sites, then finding a good quality web host can be as easy as having a friendly chat over a cup of coffee.

Webstyles is Offering 1Gb disk space and 1Gb bandwidth for your website along with email,  access to databases and much more from your CPanel account for only R30 per month.

for more information go to: http://www.webstyles.co.za/starter.html

or to sign up go to: http://www.webstyles.co.za/client/

Well this all depends on the content but generally a site needs no more than 5mb if it is just html, if you intend on adding flash to the site then 10-15mb is needed depending on the size of the flash as well as how many flash items you are using. if you intend to add downloads to your site on an ftp account then more is needed, it all depends on your usage needs.

as for bandwidth

This is an age old question that people want 3Gb or unlimited bandwidth

but the website never makes it past 10mb let alone 1 gig.

www.webstyles.co.za is 1mb in size on html alone, and the monthly usage for bandwidth is never over 50 mb with more than 3000 hits a month.

if you require any hosting of an existing site or want to start your own website then visit http://www.webstyles.co.za/starter.html

Webstyles.co.za offers 3 packages for you to choose from

the first of which is the Starter Package.

with this you can use the full 50mb for just your website
or use the additional space for email accounts which can be forwarded to an email you check regularly, you can use the space to setup a blog, forum, ecommerce site, helpdesk or anything you wish.

whether all for email, mailing lists, blogs, ecommerce pages, website or any other use you may find. the space is yours.

the only real difference is the space you choose