There are plenty of issues that might occur when it comes to hosting. Because of this, it is essential for your hosting provider to be able to provide you with some features that can help alleviate any consequences that might follow from certain unpredictable events such as complete system meltdowns or malfunctions as well as hacker breaches and potential information leaks. Not only that, but you yourself can inadvertently cause damage to your website or application. But what can your hosting provider do to keep you protected in such cases? Well, the answer is simple – there are plenty of features that they offer that can be quite useful if utilized appropriately. Here are some examples of such.
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Full system or server backups
Backups are one of the most essential features that a hosting provider can offer. They are extremely important and absolutely crucial due to the fact that they are capable of restoring your entire website/application and its database. This is something invaluable as it can protect you in all circumstances.
A full server backup can also save you from not only losing your information but also your search engine rankings as total loss of data can practically delete your website from the search index. Because of this, it is important to find a hosting provider that provides this feature either as a free or a premium add-on. If the backups are offered for free, then you can expect them to be much rarer, perhaps 1 per month, and you can also expect them to have a lower retention time of about 1 month as well, until the next one is generated.
Source: masterdc.com
While this might not seem like a lot at a first glance, it is important to remember that the vital thing to ensure here is to have a backup of your website or application, as while it can still be a detrimental setback, having something to rely on to save your project or business is much more important than having nothing at all or having to start from scratch again.
Premium backups you can expect to be a lot more common, maybe in some cases, even daily, which is something that online ecommerce stores and large corporations will benefit the most from. However, such regular, full backups will most likely cost a substantial amount of additional funds. Because of this, if you are working on a tight budget, look for a hosting provider that can either offer you free backups as a feature or a provider that will not charge you as much.
Overall, you need to take into consideration factors such as price, timeliness, freshness, time frame and frequency before making the final choice.
Server snapshots
If backups can be used to repair the damage from a complete server meltdown, then snapshots can be utilized to repair anything that you might accidentally break if trying out some new stuff or implementing changes. Snapshots are momentary pictures of your server at a given point in time, allowing you to restore your website or application to that particular moment. However, most hosting providers will not include the database or any other vital data with a snapshot. Consequently, this makes snapshots the perfect tool and feature for trying out new changes and tweaks to your site or app. Moreover, some hosting providers like VPSBG even allow you to use snapshots to copy a website from one server to another.
Optimal DDoS Protection
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We covered server malfunctions and accidental changes on your behalf, but what about hackers? DDoSing is a very well-known term and it involves sending an abundance of fake traffic towards a given website or application, overloading it due to its inability to cope with all of these bogus requests and ultimately resulting in it crashing.
This leads to unexpected downtime and in the field of ecommerce and online service providers – a loss of profit. Additionally, this downtime can also negatively impact your search performance as it has been used as a ranking signal by search engines for a long time. Because of this, it is vital to ensure that your hosting provider can offer you reliable DDoS protection in order to guarantee that your website or application will not be targeted by such DDoS actions.
Having floating IPs
The final feature that we want to touch upon in this article is to check whether your hosting provider offers any floating IPs. These can be used to quickly switch your website or application’s hosting in order to avoid any unexpected downtime or hacker breaches.
Having them included as an add-on with your hosting plan can be rare to find but there are some providers that will offer you a few floating IP addresses for free. However, most will definitely charge you extra as this is a feature that is quite useful to have.
Overall, you can never have enough tools and features to protect your website, meaning that you should consider everything we mentioned in this article and implement it when you decide to do research on different hosting providers. It is advised to find one that can offer you all of these features regardless of whether it is for free or if you would have to spend some extra money.
Source: blog.mozilla.org
Remember that the most important thing in the end is to protect your website or app as well as your server as downtime, crashes and other errors can have a severely negative impact on your reputation and business especially if you are in the world of online retail or service providing. Finally, it is important to also mention that these features will also help protect your privacy as well as that of any customers or users you might have on your website/application that have provided you with any of their personal data such as names, email addresses and interests so remember to also take them into consideration as well and go find a hosting provider that can offer you the aforementioned features.
