What can happen

Imagine, one of your good customers calls and says “I tried going to your website but I get a warning that it’s not safe – I think you’ve been hacked.” You rush to your computer and try to bring your site up – you get the same message. You ignore the warning and click through to your site and sure enough, it’s now selling a weight loss medication. What do you do?

If your website is using WordPress, the most popular content management system in the world, powering over 25% of all websites, it might also be the daily target of hackers. No longer pranksters, hackers are well financed criminals who look to take over a website and then use it to make more money.

More and more small and medium sized businesses are being targeted because they don’t have the time or technical know-how to protect themselves. Once your website is taken over it can be used to launch spam email, sell illegal products, or redirect to porn sites. Whatever it might be, you lose money and take a hit to your reputation.

In an ideal world, once a website was up and running nothing else would need to be done except add new content. But that is not the world we live in.

What can be done about it.

Ben Franklin said it best. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Updating the WordPress software, theme and plugins is one of your best defenses because it will block new vulnerabilities as they become known. But updating can be tricky, and it requires frequent checks to know when they need to be done. There are also security plugins that can assist in monitoring problems and plugging holes. Finally, regular backups both onsite (to the same server your website is on) and offsite (to a separate storage location such as Dropbox) should be performed in case your defenses are breached by the hackers.

CityCenter has put together a Security, Update & Backup service to assist you in securing your WordPress website on a long term basis. Check out everything the package contains below.

Although the actions we take are considered best practices for protecting your website, they are not an absolute guarantee that it won’t be compromised. The hackers are constantly developing new methods and are quite good at what they do. Should your website be compromised we will recommend services to clean it up and restore it, but that cost and action is outside what we are offering here.

Take advantage of our experience and skill to keep your website safe – cleaning up after you’ve been hacked can be very expensive.

Security, Update & Backup Service

Clean-up: The first step to ensuring the safety of your website is to bring all of the software up to date. We make a backup of all of the files and the database, and then update the WordPress version and all plugins. If needed, we will change the administrator username and password so they are not easily guessed.
Optimize: We clear out unneeded page revisions and post versions that are stored in the database. Unneeded plugins can slow a website down and cause potential problems so we de-activate them as well.
Protection: We install security and backup software so ongoing protection of your website is made easier and more certain. This includes blocking “brute force” attacks where a hacker uses software to repeatedly attempt to login in to the site with different username/password combinations. (Note: The backups offered in this service are kept on the server your website is hosted on. We can set up the backups to be done to a remote location for an additional one-time fee.)
Update: When new vulnerabilities in WordPress related software are discovered they are used by hackers immediately to start probing and violating websites. Fixes are issued by the software authors to patch those vulnerabilities as soon as possible. We perform those updates on an ongoing basis to make sure your website is up-to-date with the latest versions – that is the number one protection against the hackers.
Security: We perform regular malware scans of your website to catch problems early.
Monitoring: We regularly check your website to make sure it is up and running and alert you if it goes down.
 
  Pricing
  $150 setup, then
  $40/month, or
  $360/year

Contact CityCenter Today!

I want to talk with someone as soon as possible about getting my site secure.