Managed Hosting: Speedy, Hacker-Free Zone

Seriously, don't risk losing your site. We'll keep you live and secure.

OCG Creative Managed Hosting Services

Cybersecurity is a major concern for business. Big-business data breaches make the news all the time, but hacking poses a significant threat to small businesses as well.

There are countless reasons hackers hack, but here are the most common ones.

• Inject Malicious Content
• Spread Viruses
• Steal Visitors’ Personal Information
• Steal Business’ Private Information
• Host Phishing Pages from Your Server
• Host “Legit” Pages from Your Server
• Overload Your Web Server
• Steal Server Bandwidth
• Vandalize Your Website

Getting hacked and getting ripped off are basically the same thing. They both suck.

Did you know: Hacking attempts have increased in frequency at an alarming rate.

A few years ago, a typical website on our network would experience a few dozen hacking attempts daily. Today, it is common to thwart several thousand. Think for a moment. That’s your website fending off thousands of attackers every single day.

Our engineering team works every day to stay ahead of online assailants, but it is a cat and mouse game that the host doesn’t always win. Because of this, our ability to respond to a breach is as critical is minimizing the possibility of one happening in the first place.

Hosting Challenges

Every website is vulnerable, and it is almost a certainty that your site will be hacked eventually. Hacks come in many forms. Server attacks exploit security holes within the web server itself. Common targets are server software like Microsoft IIS, Apache and Nginx, weaknesses from programming languages, unprotected ports, dangerous traffic routing, and countless others.

In addition to server attacks, we fend off a daily barrage of front-end assaults to individual websites. In this case, the attacker exploits vulnerabilities that are built into the website. Hackers all over the world work 24/7 finding ways to exploit websites that you’d never imagine could be compromised. Significant risk can be eliminated by improving human factors like choosing strong passwords and limiting back-end website access to those that really need it. However, the scale, complexity and dynamic nature of the web environment requires technical solutions and constant monitoring, along with frequent software updates. Here are a few of the most common exploits.

1. Comment Functions
2. Contact Forms
3. CMS Databases
4. CMS Core Weaknesses, including programming languages themselves
5. Plugins and 3rd party add-ons
6. Poorly Designed Themes
7. User Accounts

Any of these can open a pathway from the user to server software and the database. What’s worse, it is standard practice to share server space with hundreds, or even thousands of individual websites. That means a single exploit on one website can take down a network of thousands. It’s a little like an apartment fire.

Types of Hosting

Among business owners, web hosting is one of the least understood aspects of managing a website. Hosting options range from a few-dollar-per-month add-on when you purchase your domain, to massive, distributed data centers that host a single large-scale website. Regardless of size, all hosting options perform fundamentally the same task.

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We are pretty sure this sign refers to cheap website hosting plans. Don't risk it!

Budget Website Hosting

At the bottom of the web hosting hierarchy is shared hosting on massive networks that are configured to make servers cheap and easy for the hosting company to manage. Many budget hosts offer plans starting below $10/mo. These plans nearly always place strict limits on monthly bandwidth allocations, so the cost usually rises to $30 to $50 per month as traffic builds.

The pricing is very attractive, even after adding bandwidth, however, there are downsides. Perhaps most crucial is you are entirely on your own, or at the mercy of technical support personnel when your website is eventually hacked. Many sites cannot be restored at all, since budget hosting usually doesn’t include backups. It adds up to a nightmare in stress and lost business, and sometimes results in a costly digital do-over.

As mentioned, the shared environment also makes individual websites susceptible to vulnerabilities created by other websites on the same host. Even if your website doesn’t go down, your virtual “bad neighbor” can actually get your website (including your email accounts) blacklisted simply by existing on the same IP block.

The danger is real. Your website is being attacked right this minute—probably a hundred or more times every hour. Eventually, one of the attackers will get in. When the inevitable happens, if you use a budget host, you’ll need to have a plan for dealing with it on your own.

This was taken during a product shoot on a beach in Maui. Needless to say, we enjoy these jobs even if they are a lot of work.

Self-Hosting Your Website

You can host your website yourself. In fact, getting a working host server up and running is pretty easy. All that’s required is a computer set up to run hosting and database software, plus a static IP address. Today, self-hosing makes little sense because you incur all the challenges of budget hosting, plus the myriad issues related to hardware maintenance. On top of that, a simple power outage or flakey hard drive will knock your website right off the Internet.

Enterprise Hosting

Opposite that, large-scale solutions ensure enterprise websites never go down. These are optimized networks custom built to meet the needs of the business. Typically, this type of hosting environment spans multiple geographic regions to ensure a natural disaster in one area won’t affect the others.

These systems run on ultra-fast hardware and ultra-fast networks, using the latest everything and include full-time optimization and security teams. It’s also ultra-expensive and far exceeds the needs and budgetary requirements of the typical business.

Your website is your business. Lock it down! (This is in New Orleans, BTW.)

OCG Creative Managed Hosting

We offer managed, SSL-encrypted, secure hosting. Our network is cloud-based, co-located and very stable. Through massive bandwidth allocation and generous burst capability, we’ve never had a traffic-related outage on any of our servers.

In years past, we offered hosting plans for as little as $21.25 per month, or $255 per year. SSL hosting was added later for an additional $10 per month, charged yearly at $375. About three years ago, we stopped offering non-SSL hosting to improve security and data integrity.

In addition, we offer various maintenance plans to keep on top of website related issues like updates, backups and patching known vulnerabilities.

We didn’t stop there. We moved our network to a more stable and flexible cloud-based system, added nightly backups, performance enhancements and an aggressive update cycle. To limit the possibility of one website taking down others, we host no more than 10 websites on a single node. Further, since we do not offer hosting for business owners we don’t directly work with, questionable websites can’t exist anywhere on our systems.

Beyond security, we’re making advances in speed and usability by conforming to industry standards and blazing a few trails of our own. There’s too much to list, but the result is a better experience for visitors to your website, and a more stable platform for you to do business online.

Finally, many of these enhancements are in response to best practices and ranking factors outlined by Google. This is critical, as up to 70% of your traffic likely originates on a mobile device.

We only offer hosting for websites we manage

For performance and security reasons, it is no longer practical for us to offer hosting without also managing back end server updates and mitigating potential threats from individual websites.

Managed Hosting by OCG Creative

Best for business owners and managers that actively maintain their websites, and are comfortable updating CMS software and plugins. Managed hosting includes server maintenance and server-related security updates and enhancements. It also includes recovery of your website from a recent backup if needed. It does not include any work on the website itself. Website maintenance and security issues not related to hosting are the responsibility of the website owner.

Managed Hosting Includes:
• Bandwidth to support daily traffic, plus temporary bursts in traffic
• CA-signed SSL Certificate and certificate renewals
• Server-side security updates
• Server performance enhancements
• Nightly backups
• Website restoration from backup when necessary
• Add 1x per month updates from Word Press and plug-ins at an additional cost of $30/month (recommended). Additional fees may apply if updates disrupt service.

Website Management Plan

This option is best for website owners that require a complete solution for website hosting and security, as well as updates to website software and related plugins. This includes website uptime monitoring, recovery from backups and SSL configuration and renewal. Our website management plan includes everything required to keep your website live, secure and accessible. It does not include changes to content, images, etc.

Website Management Plan Includes:

All Managed Hosting Services Above, Plus:
• Bandwidth to support daily traffic, plus temporary bursts in traffic
• CA-signed SSL Certificate and certificate renewals
• Server-side security updates
• Server performance enhancements
• Nightly backups
• Website restoration from backup when necessary

Also Included:
• Updates to website CMS software and plugins
• Uptime monitoring

The sharks are everywhere! (Like this one in the Bahamas...) Don't let your website fall prey!

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