wordpress

Everything You Need to Know About Web Hosting Before Choosing A Web Hosting Provider

Posted on by Mario

Having a business is not only about having a store and selling some stuff. There are more than just meets the eye. In order for your business to succeed, you have to grow your business both offline and online. When it comes to growing a business online, you need to have a website as well. And when you have a website, you have to consider hiring not only web designer and web developer, but also web hosting services. Why? Web hosting is the place where all the files of your website live. Think of it as the home of your website where it actually lives. Now that you understand the importance of web hosting, now you should understand some facts about web hosting before you decide to choose a web hosting provider. Keep reading this article to find out!

There are different types of web hosting

If you’ve spent any amount of time on a web host’s website, you’ve probably seen terms like shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud, WordPress, and reseller. They represent the different web hosting types, but not every web host offers them all. Plus, the hosting types differ from one another in significant ways. Dedicated servers offer close to metal implementation with little overhead, and they’ve been traditionally the go-to-solution for high performance demanding tasks. On the other hand, VPS allows clients to get a share of a physical server for a number of hardware resources they’ve paid for, and multiple clients often share one physical host machine. Cloud servers are often confused with the VPS, as both are based on virtualization and come with many of the same advantages. Much of the definition, however, depends on the particular host provider.

They say “Unlimited” but it’s not quite unlimited

Web hosts will encourage you to sign up for their web hosting plans by convincing you with the promise of unlimited storage or monthly data transfers. It’s generally not a completely honest deal. Now, I am not saying that that these web hosts are straight up lying, but the “unlimited” storage or data transfers boasts nearly always have limitations that vary by company. So, it is what it is.

Your website can be vulnerable to cyber attacks

Hacks, malwares, and virus are common cyber attacks that can damage your business website. Sadly, many people who are just starting out with their own website may not be aware of all the associated quirks that come with maintaining a successful online presence. But once you get into the details of it all, you’ll realize that understanding the essence of secure web hosting will be hugely beneficial to your website.

As you might suspect, there are plenty of other factors to consider regarding web hosting security, and the security policies of your website in general. However, we’ve tried to outline the most important ones here, so that you have a general idea of where you should start while shoring up your online safety. For that reason, you should be careful with choosing the right web hosting provider for your business website.

Simple Methods of Adding SSL to Your WordPress Website

Posted on by Mario

SSL WORDPRESS

People choose SSL mostly because it provides more secure information and gives more benefits, especially from a user’s perspective, as any information they share with your site via a form, shopping cart, etc. is encrypted – it is safe from the third party. However, few web developers that know the very same principles also apply to site administrators.

In fact, running the WordPress admin in https also brings huge benefit, since you can secure all the sensitive information you input daily inside of WordPress. All of this information needs protection; therefore, it is essential for every WordPress website out there to renew the certificate in every three months.

If you are in a tight budget, you can opt on the market for low-cost certificates that do the job nicely in most cases. Remember that ecommerce sites might be better off with higher level certificates that offer features like identity validation which allows customer to know you better.

This makes us have no reason for not giving a little time and money to understand and apply an SSL certificate. So, if you are committed to integrating SSL with a WordPress installation, now it’s time to discover the ways.

HTTPS Your WordPress

Before, we setup WordPress to utilize an HTTPS connection; you have to make sure that you already have an SSL certificate installed on your server. Actually, it is quite simple to setup WordPress to utilize an https connection, as follows:

  • Back up the site
  • Change the Site URL
  • Ensure all internal links and attachments use https
  • Run the WordPress admin in https
  • Automatically forward http requests to https

Change the Site URL

First, navigate over to settings > General inside the WordPress administration area since you’ll want to change the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) from ‘http://www.yourdomain.com’ to ‘https://www.yourdomain.com’. Scroll down to the bottom and save the changes when you’re done and then, WordPress will automatically log you out. If you want to log back, you can use the newly-secured URL.

Make Sure All Internal Links/Attachments Use HTTPS

Even though you change the URL, image or attachment URL throughout WordPress, it will not suddenly switch your website into HTTPS. In order to discover ways to change the URL site, you can conduct a search and replace area of your database. One thing for sure, you need to back up your site to prevent anything from going wrong.

Nowadays, you can find many searches and replace plugins available for WordPress, but you can give a try to Velvet Blues Update URLs, as it can be an effective solution. Furthermore, this plugin only touches the areas of the database that need changes, so you will not mistakenly change the right thing. In fact, you can update URLs to get started once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, head over to tools > Update URLs to get started.

Don’t worry as using plugin is as simple as adding the old and new URLs for your site. All you need to do is make sure that all the settings look are correct then click “Update URLs Now” when you’re ready and let the plugin take care of the rest. You’ll see a report on the screen that says how many URLs are changed and where the plugin found them, once the URLs have been replaced.

Run the WordPress Admin in HTTPS

In order to ensure that there will be HTTPS in the WordPress back end, you should grab the latest version of your site’s wp-config.php file and add the following line just above “/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */”:


Now, you can save and upload the file to your server.

Automatically Forward http Requests to Https

The last step is to make sure that you only use https URLs for your site. First, you need to download the latest copy of your site’s .htaccess file and add the following just underneath the line “RewriteEngine On”:

Then save and upload the file to your server. You can try and enter an http URL for your site in a browser to test it. If you do it right, it should automatically forward you to the https version. Bear in mind that every server has been set up differently, so you should find other ways to make this work. Feel free to contact your web host for suggestions.

Troubleshooting a ‘Broken’ Lock

Discover if there are any broken padlock icons in your browser’s address bar and/or mixed content warnings. If you find any, then something is trying to load in from an http address. Usually, it is caused by a script or other outside resource being called from your site’s theme or CSS. As a solution, you can refresh the page and see if that clears up the issue.

If the problem is still going on, you can visit “Why No Padlock?” and input your URL that you want to analyze. The site will scan and analyze it for you.

Conclusion

Keeping user’s information private is an important thing, especially if you are doing a business in digital world. By seeing the green padlock in your site’s address, users will think that your business takes their personal information seriously. This will surely increase their trust and interest to buy something from you or even fill out a simple contact form.

All About WordPress’ Protection: How Secure is WordPress?

Posted on by Mario

Is-WordPress-Secure

As one of the most used websites in the world, WordPress has mostly been trusted by people for many purposes; however, many web developers are still wondering about whether or not WordPress is secure, since it surely has its flaws too. It is definitely not only the WordPress team’s responsibility to protect the underlying core of WordPress, but the responsibility also ultimately falls on your shoulders too.

Since WordPress is generally discussed online, consequently, the weaknesses of the platform are widely known. This is why hackers can easily target WordPress websites. Therefore, it is important to learn about how secure a WordPress is. Let’s figure out the explanation below.

What You Need to Know About the WordPress Project and Security

Below are things that you may need to know, regarding the WordPress Project and what they are doing to maintain the security of the core.

The WordPress Security Team

The WordPress security team is responsible for identifying security risks in the core. Aside from that, they are also good at reviewing potential issues with the third-party-submitted themes or plugins and then making recommendations on how they can harden their tools or patch known breaches. They also work on their own to identify and resolve issues, even though they may need some other experts in the field sometimes.

How WordPress identifies Security Risks

There are several ways that are used by the security risks to identify and resolute process work.

  • An issue can be identified by anyone. It can be someone from the security team or from outside of the team. For non-project members, you can communicate these detected issues by emailing security @wordpress.org.
  • A report is logged and the security team acknowledges receipt of it.
  • To verify that the threat is valid, team members need to work together on a walled-off and private server.
  • Then, they can track, test, and repair any security flaws detected.
  • After that, the security patch then gets added to the next minor WordPress release.
  • If you have a mild problem, WordPress will notify you within the WordPress dashboard whenever an automatic release occurs.
  • On the other hand, the release will go out immediately and WordPress.org will announce it on the News page of the website in more urgent issues.

Even though WordPress doesn’t always announce these security patches immediately, they will always take immediate action to resolve problems.

A Note about Automatic Updates

WordPress is able to push minor updates automatically to all websites, since version 3.7. In this way, the WordPress security team can get urgent patches out as timely as possible without having to wait for users to accept and make the update on each of their websites.

However, as a WordPress user, you can opt out of these automatic core updates. In fact, if this happens to you, please keep in mind that this may put your site at additional risk, especially when you don’t have time to monitor all your sites all the time for the latest and greatest update.

WordPress Plugins and Themes Security

Even though it may sound impossible to manage the  tens of thousands of plugins and themes out there, at least WordPress can keep a close eye on them to ensure nothing seriously insecure slips through the cracks.

When a security issue is detected, the WordPress Project is the team, responsible for working with developers. However, before that, there is a team of volunteers assigned to review each and every theme or plugin submitted to WordPress. This team is specially formed to work with developers and ensure that best practices are followed.

Nevertheless, there will always be security vulnerabilities found and that’s why we need security team to step in to:

  • Provide documentation for WordPress developers on plugin and theme development and security best practices.
  • Monitor plugins and themes for potential security flaws. Any issues detected will then be brought to the attention of the developer.
  • Remove harmful plugins or themes from the directory if the developers are unresponsive or uncooperative.

Later, when those security patches are available, WordPress will then notify its users via the WordPress admin.

OWASP’s Top 10

With the purpose of protecting organizations from software and programs that could potentially do harm, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Foundation was created back in 2001. What you may be surprised to learn is that the WordPress Project aims to abide by OWASP’s Top at all times.

Below are the top 10 list comprised by the OWASP of known and very serious security risks. By using the list, the WordPress security team uses those trends to define their own top 10 list of ways to defend the core. Basically, their goal is to protect the core from the following risks:

  1. User account management abuse
  2. Unauthenticated access requests to the WordPress admin
  3. Unwanted or unauthorized redirects
  4. Exposing users’ private data
  5. Requests for access to direct object reference
  6. Server misconfiguration
  7. Unauthorized code injection
  8. Cross-site scripting from unauthorized users
  9. Cross-site request forgeries whereby hackers misuse WordPress nonces
  10. Corrupted third-party plugins, themes, frameworks, libraries, etc.

Summary

Knowing that there is a dedicated team working that keeps the WordPress core secure at all times will surely let WordPress users feel at ease. Still, we have to do what we can do to secure it from every angle, since no matter how good the WordPress Project is at monitoring and securing the platform, hackers will find a way in.