Choosing WordPress Hosting that makes your website future-ready

The following is a sponsored post.

Like most readers of this blog, you’re probably considering starting your blogging business with WordPress or have just gotten started with it. WordPress is one of the most popular platforms to start a blog on and is a great choice. Getting your blog started on any platform and hosting is perfectly alright to start with but what you need to realize is that as your online business grows, you will require WordPress hosting that will cater to the growth of your website-a feature that standard WordPress hosting products in the market do not cater to.

Let’s face it, the reality for us full-time bloggers and small business owners is that we really lack the time or may be even the technical expertise to look into the finer details of hosting. We may not be able to or even want to manage fiddly bits on our website hands-on in addition to protecting it from the constant threats in cyberspace.

What can really help is a hosting plan for our WordPress websites that will support us through this kind of growth. ResellerClub’s WordPress hosting services aims to do just that. They provide 2 kinds of WordPress hosting services – one, designed specifically for bloggers and small businesses like us and the other for those who value automated upgrades and the like, but can spend effort on securing and backing-up their websites while working on a tighter budget. Whichever one of the plans you choose, your business is sure to benefit as I explain below.

1. Scalability – This hosting plan will grow along with your website

This WordPress hosting product is built on cloud technology making it very scalable. This means that your hosting plan can instantly adjust to traffic spikes to your website. When you are running a promotional campaign or a blogger outreach event, you can ramp up your package to 8 CPU cores and 8 GB RAM to boost your site on demand and scale it down when things come back to normal. You can sleep easy about resource usage warnings, slow page loads or any of the usual hang-ups you may face on other non-cloud or non-dedicated WordPress platforms.

1. Automatic updates – You never need to worry about having the latest version of WordPress

WordPress releases feature and security updates on a regular basis and staying on top of these updates is critical for your site’s performance and security. Their WordPress hosting plan will ensure that you do not need to worry about having to install any WordPress updates as these will be automatically installed for you. This guarantees that your blog / website is secure at all times. If you have any themes or plugins that may have compatibility issues, you can review them and stagger your upgrade to ensure your services do not break.

1. Managed services – ResellerClub does everything for you

As I mentioned earlier, the WordPress Hosting offered by ResellerClub has 2 flavors and the 4 plans with the Security Suite also include Fully Managed WordPress support.  With managed support, the ResellerClub support team, is available 24X7 to handle any queries or technical changes that you may need on your order, leaving you free to focus on your core business. These could be tasks such as plugin installation, helping you resolve issues with extensions and scripts, migrating your current WordPress hosting package to ResellerClub, etc.

1. Security – Automated Backups and Website Vulnerability Scanning / Fixing

The security suite is only offered to the plans for bloggers and small businesses. Being the most popular content management system in the world, WordPress also attracts the most attention from hackers.

To highlight the importance of securing your WordPress website, here is a (non-exhaustive) list of WordPress issues that occurred in the last year: 

• January 11th  2017: A security update for WordPress 4.7 was released around a month after its launch in December, 2016.
• January 26^th 2017: Security update released to fix 3 issues in WordPress 4.7.1.
• February 6^th 2017: Hackers exploited a vulnerability in WordPress that allowed them to deface web pages across 39,000 domains.
• March 6^th  2017:WordPress responded by asking all its users to upgrade to its latest version of 4.7.3 as they found that an earlier version of 4.7.2 and 4.7.1  had major vulnerabilities that could give attackers access to servers and users.
  • Another one of the vulnerabilities allowed hackers to slow down or crash a WordPress server by making a specific site demand excess server resources.
  • Further, a widely-used WordPress gallery plugin with over 1 million installations was recently fixed to remove a vulnerability exposing website databases to attack. This vulnerability allows a hacker to grab sensitive user information from a WordPress website database.
• May 16th 2017: WordPress released another update as version 4.7.5 to fix 6 further security issues.
• Nov 29th 2017: WordPress released fixes for it’s version 4.9 to fix issues that could have left the website open to a multi-vector attack.
• Dec 18th 2017: Security firm, Wordfence, reported that hackers launched an enormous brute-force attack on close to 190,000 WordPress websites each hour. This made it one of the largest online security threats in years.  Visitors to these infected WordPress websites would in turn be affected by malware.
• Jan 24th 2018: A security firm, Sucuri, discovered that over 2000 WordPress websites were infected by a keylogger that hackers loaded onto the WordPress backend login page.(Note: keyloggers are software programs that track the keystrokes of your keypad-capturing everything from your password, credit card numbers and other sensitive information)

The WordPress Hosting + Security Suite plans that ResellerClub offers helps you stay ahead of these threats and makes your website resilient, in the odd event of a hack. Now you don’t have to worry about new or existing threats to your website, or every new WordPress update.

How will this product secure your website?

1. With an advanced anti-malware service

This hosting product comes pre-integrated with one of the most advanced anti-malware products in the market- SiteLock-a powerful website protection service which will protect your website from potential online threats and fix any vulnerabilities.

Now, like me, you may be thinking – shouldn’t the hosting provider be responsible for protecting my website?

Yes they are. However, the reality is that security can only be provided upto a certain extent – i.e at the level of the network, Operating System and Firewall.  Your website is still susceptible to local vulnerabilities due to potential flaws in your website or CMS (WordPress) code.

What can you avoid with SiteLock?

Without Sitelock, you can leave your website open to :

• Letting  hackers gain access to your database and stealing your customers’ information like email addresses, passwords, credit card data etc.

• Keeping hackers from defacing your site

• Being blacklisted by search engines.

Sitelock will ensure that your website is never a victim or agent of any of the situations above.

What’s more –like every other component in this product, SiteLock is specifically designed for users who do not have the required technical expertise or time to protect their websites from the threats that are a constant possibility today.

As a plus point, you can add the SiteLock badge or Trust Seal to your website to assure your visitors that your site is perfectly secure.

2. With a cloud-based backup service

The product also comes pre-integrated with a website backup and monitoring service called CodeGuard.

Again, isn’t the hosting provider responsible for backing up my website?

Yes, they are. However, most of hosting companies tend to keep website backups in the same place as the primary files -which is usually on the same server on which the website has been hosted. In case the website is attacked and brought down, primary files along with the backed up ones get affected.

CodeGuard, on the other hand, provides backups that are stored securely in the cloud. Also, most hosting companies provide you only the latest backup of your website-which in our case, the last 7 days. CodeGuard follows a versioning system and allows the user to restore a backup of an earlier date as well.

In short, what does CodeGuard do for you?

• It automatically backups all of your data
• informs you of any changes in your site’s content in each backed up version
• It alerts you to any changes in the site’s content
• has restore options to avoid any downtime to your website

ResellerClub’s WordPress hosting plans start at just $3.39 per month and they are currently offering a discount of upto 30% off for anyone who would like to try out these features for themselves.