Light the jack-o-lantern, wrap up in your vampire cape, and hang on to your Halloween candy, because it’s time for spooky stories about your website!
“They’re coming to get you, Barbara…” — The Zombie Hordes of DDoS
Thousands of bot-nets shuffling across the Internet, crowding against your firewalls, hammering against your login pages, stopping anyone from coming to see you. You’ve locked down your website, you’ve bolted the doors, you’ve stocked up on good content, but the horde keeps coming, blocking all traffic to your site.
Good web hosts have good DDoS firewall protection, blocking traffic from known IPs. Adding a CDN on top of your firewall protection will also help, moving traffic around the world to even out the pressure. Our Professional and Ultimate hosting packages come with our built-in CDN on top of our auto-scaling platform, meaning that no matter how many zombies come stumbling down your way, they’ll never get in.
“You… you… you believe in germs, right?” — Viruses finding their way in
How did the zombies come to be? Maybe it was a virus, infecting one computer, then another, then another. Or maybe the virus does something else. Maybe it sits on your application, recording all the data that’s coming in. Maybe it gives someone else access to all your information. Maybe it lets something else in, something worse.
A good firewall helps protect against viruses, and all our packages come with malware scanners for even more protection, but there’s also plenty that you can do to keep your website safe. Make sure you have antivirus software on your computers to keep them safe. If you’re using a content management system like WordPress, make sure you have all the security features activated. Keep yourself updated, clean, and vaccinated, and those mutant viruses won’t sneak in.
“It’s alive…alive!” — Developers going too far
You wanted your site to have all the features of Amazon mixed with all the features of Facebook mixed with all the video capability of YouTube, but you could only afford someone who just learned the basics of PHP. Copy some Stackoverflow code here, install a framework there, slap a cheap theme on top, and now your Frankenstein’s Monster of a website groans and comes to life, destroying the town as he goes.
When you hire someone to build your website, make sure that both of you know your expectations, your limitations, and your capabilities. Start small for your initial website, then add more over time. And make sure you hire a developer that can handle what you want to build.
“Leave me to do my dark bidding on the Internet!” — Applications draining your energy
You don’t know what’s making your website run slowly, but it happens every time, taking away the speed and responsiveness you built in. Things slow down, cause problems, and break before your eyes as you see your customer numbers waste away. But you know it’s your fault. You invited them in.
Those applications and plugins might have seemed like a great idea at the time, but the more you add, the more processing power is needed. Go through your site, see what you’re not using, and clear them out. If there’s a native solution that takes the place of a framework, use that. Cut out the number of callbacks your site is making to the server, and you’ll see a change in your loading times.
“The mortician said that Death has a design…” — The sudden loss of your site
But no matter how careful you are, no matter how well you’ve fought off the zombie hordes, the mutant viruses, the mad scientists, or the vampires, it can still happen. Death has a design for us all, and your website has gone down. Maybe it was an errant application update. Maybe it was a problem when your renewal payment was taken. Maybe the power went out across the entire data centre. Anything could happen and anything will happen.
But you don’t have to start carving the tombstone and getting out the mourning garb. A good backup can bring your site back to life, restoring it to a point before it went down. Our Automated Backups (available with our Managed WordPress packages and an extra add-on for our hosting packages) give you snapshot backups over the past 30 days. Just choose the backup you want, restore it to your site, and just like the sun rising over the abandoned cabin in the woods, it’s like nothing ever happened.
(Featured image by Sabina Music Rich on Unsplash)
Quotes:
“They’re coming to get you, Barbara” — Night of the Living Dead
“You… you… you believe in germs, right?” — 12 Monkeys
“It’s alive…alive!” — Frankenstein
“Leave me to do my dark bidding on the Internet!” — What We Do In The Shadows
“The mortician said that Death has a design…” — Final Destination
