- Days,
- Hours,
- Minutes,
- Seconds
Free And On-Demand
We scan all websites every day for common malware. Using commercial tools and systems developed in-house, we discover all sorts of nasties. Malware – such as web shells or mail/spam daemons – can compromise your installation, giving criminals access to your site’s data, email and content.
We give you a detailed report on the results of this scan in our SirsteveHQ control panel. This is similar to services provided by some other web hosts – which they charge a premium for!
Should malware be discovered, we can send you an email alert.
WordPress users also have another way to check for malware, through our WordPress Checksum Report in our WordPress Tools suite. This checks that your WordPress core matches the official WordPress repository.
If you’ve discovered malware on your site, you’ll need to update the software or plugins, and delete any compromised files. Once you’ve made the changes, you can re-scan right away. You’ll get confirmation on whether your fixes have worked immediately.
What makes our malware scanning special is that you can also run our scanner on-demand. This is convenient because you don’t have to wait until the next scheduled scan.
If malware is detected, PHP mail is disabled to prevent your site from further infecting others through email.
Https Everywhere
SSL-TLS certificates are an integral part of secure web browsing and data transfer. Legal regulations and promotion by Google have made it essential that every site should have one. So we partner with Let’s Encrypt to make every site we host an ‘https’ one.
Our free SSLs are ‘wildcard’ certificates. So you can secure subdomains as well as your primary domain using one certificate. To get a free ‘https’ certificate your site needs to use the validated SirsteveHQ nameservers. They provide the same level of security as any other SSL certificate.
Built For Business
Our data centres are ISO27001:2013 certified. Their security features include:
- 24-7 security on site
- Photo ID and swipe card entry
- CCTV inside and out
- Gated access and secure perimeter fencing
- Redundant and uninterruptible power supplies
SirsteveHQ employees need to identify themselves before accessing any internal system. We use centralised identification and security policies that follow a least-privilege and need-to-know access policy.
Safe For Business
If your business takes card payments, your hosting needs to be PCI compliant.
To accept, store and process debit/credit card information, the hosting provider must be compliant with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS). These standards were introduced to reduce credit card fraud.
The PCI Security Standards Council are responsible for ordering regular tests on hosting providers. They test for vulnerabilities where hackers could potentially steal cardholder information. SirsteveHQ consistently pass these independent audits.
Email Scans
Whenever we reject a message for a known virus or network deny listing, the message is returned to the sender so the sender knows what's happening. We never ‘black hole’ email. All emails and forwarders sent and received are subject to advanced antivirus and anti-spam protection.
We use 3 layers of inbound spam and virus scanning:
Network-level: Commercial anti-spam deny lists from Spamhaus, Invaluement and Barracuda Networks are used to reject mail from known spam networks.
Virus Scanning: Any known malware signatures are rejected.
Content-based: Messages are scanned for spam-like characteristics and filtered into the ‘junk mail’ folder.
These filters are fully configurable via the webmail control panel. So certain senders, domains and TLDs can be allow-listed to bypass the content filter entirely. The same goes with deny lists: you can create your own from our control panel.
If you’re using the email accounts included with our shared hosting, you don’t want miscreants to harm your reputation (and ours) by sending out masses of ‘spam’ email. So we monitor outgoing emails to ensure this doesn’t happen and operate a zero-tolerance spam policy.
IP address pooling groups and blacklist avoidance technology ensures email best practices are followed. Blacklisting is a huge issue for other hosting companies; you won't have to worry about IP blacklisting again.
Two-Factor Authentication
Unfortunately many security measures are rendered ineffective if your password is compromised. So we offer the option to use two-factor authentication (2FA) for SirsteveHQ, SirsteveHQ CP and SSH access.
2FA is a way to add an extra layer of security. Our 2FA uses TOTP apps, which provide you with a time-sensitive single-use code to enter as well your password. 2FA app providers include Google and Microsoft. The apps are run from your phone.
We also enforce another form of ‘2FA’: random security checks when payments are made. This will require you to call us and confirm additional security information provided by yourself when first signing-up.
1 Tbps+ Anti-DDOS
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are a growing hazard on the web. They can do extensive damage to a business by flooding the server with requests, so that regular website users are unable to access your website.
If your shared hosting or virtual private server (VPS) is attacked, usually you don’t have much of a choice other than to weather the storm and wait for the attack to stop.
That’s why we introduced 1 Tbps+ anti-DDoS protection. This enterprise-level protection covers you against most attacks. It only filters-out malicious traffic, so you can carry on working without noticing any interruption. Don’t let the hackers ruin your business.
Web Application Firewall
One way to stop security breaches is to prevent criminals getting access to your code on the server. Our Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects your data and software by blocking suspicious activity.
A common attack on a website is to use web forms to insert malicious code. Forms aren’t covered by traditional firewalls, as they need to allow information to pass from the user to the server where the website is hosted. They can be an access point for data thieves or ransomware.
Even in the best-case scenario, being a victim of this will cost your business time and money. Worst case: a breach could end your company.
The SirsteveHQ WAF helps prevent this by inspecting every HTTP request for SQL injection, trojans, cross-site scripting, path traversal and many other types of attack. It does this at the edge our network, so it happens before any scripts from web apps like WordPress execute. It takes less than a millisecond.
The SirsteveHQ security team regularly update the set of rules that filter-out malicious requests. This ruleset is made from commercially-available resources and custom rules written by the SirsteveHQ security team.
All this makes it much more difficult to hack your sites, and goes on behind the scenes at SirsteveHQ.
Network Protections
As well as the firewall, we also operate network defences. These are based on IP address and network-level (automated system) level reputation. They’re designed to block likely attackers before an attack starts.
Suspicious IP addresses and networks are routed to different web servers automatically, so traffic and load is kept away from standard web servers. IP addresses that have a bad reputation are blocked at the network edge, and entire ranges of IP addresses can be blocked too.
SirsteveHQ Protect
A common attack vector for cyber criminals is to use brute force to guess your website’s ‘admin’ password. These are applications that cycle through common passwords and use trial and error – random letters and numbers – to try to crack your credentials.
Our platform includes SirsteveHQProtect, which monitors log-in attempts to your website. It checks for potential ‘evil’ automated requests. If they’re detected, it uses Google’s latest reCAPTCHA tools and if necessary, blocks those attempts.
This also stops our platform being slowed-down. It blocks up to six million requests – every day. Logins to our WordPress hosting platform are our most popular target, but SirsteveHQProtect covers all common website logins.
A cyber-attack uses up a lot of web hosting resources, even if it’s unsuccessful. If you’re on our shared hosting, our autoscaling servers will account for the attack, meaning that your site will stay fast and online. At other hosts, an attack on one of your hosting ‘neighbours’ can slow down your site. Not so at SirsteveHQ.
Our platform has redundancy at every level. In the event of a hardware, software or network failure, automatic failover occurs to bring services back online. This redundant hardware and software design helps availability and mitigate data loss.
Web servers serve only websites, MySQL servers just run MySQL and email servers only email. Logs are sent to central log servers. These isolated server roles mean that even in the worst-case scenario where your website was compromised, an attacker won’t be able to cover their tracks or read your email.
Our hosting allows you block malicious IP addresses, entire subnets or even whole countries, if you like. That’s up to you.
You can add passwords to areas of websites or whole sites quickly and easily, without having to code.
Commonly used access systems such as FTP, SFTP, Remote MySQL and SSH are denied and can only be enabled after authentication through the control panel. You can unlock FTP for a set period of time so you can make changes, then it will lock automatically.
Scan your website files for permission-based errors to prevent unauthorised access. Our File Permissions Checker will recommend and fix errors automatically.
If the worst happens, you should still have website backups to fall back on. You can create site backups quickly and easily in our control panel or set them to happen automatically.
Generate secure random passwords from within our control panel. No need to resort to external password creation applications.
FTP and SFTP is secured by Transport Layer Security protocols: the same crypto that helps create ‘https’ URLs. So, file transfers are less likely to be read or tampered-with by criminals.
Manage all of your website’s HTTP security headers in a simple dashboard. You can toggle the policies that allow or deny the passing-on of security-related information between the client and server.
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