How to Secure Web Hosting and Website Monitoring? | #WordPress

You can have all the security features in place for your WordPress site but if they are all on an infected server in your web-hosting account, then your site can still get infected. Now, I don’t mean to be a Debbie-downer here because this is the worst case scenario and may never happen but you should plan for the worst and hope for the best.

Now with this in mind, it’s best to plan on moving your sites to a VPS that stands for virtual private service or dedicated server as soon as your budget allows for it, as soon as you can afford it. now, as far as starting out and using a shared hosting plan like most of us do that are on a budget, there are a couple of questions that you should ask the hosting company before you purchase an account from them.

No. 1, how often do you run malware scans on your servers? Not individual accounts but on the servers that those accounts reside.

No. 2, do you do backups of your account? And if so, how often and is it free and if not, how much is this extra going to cost me?

Now, there are plenty of other questions to ask in general like, say, how many domains can I have on my account? How many e-mail accounts can I have? What’s the bandwidth limitation and so on? But most of these are actually spelled out on the hosting company’s websites. So if you want to save a ton of time in research, then you can contact a guy named Jim@tvcnet.com. I mean I will just show you that. that’s TVCnet.com and it will just redirect you to this site here, and you’re going to use the phone number, see if you got questions and they’ve got a complete list here of all the different types of services that they offer. The prices are very reasonable. The main kicker here is you’ve got the daily malware scan and they also provide the backups. So, definitely include TVCnet.com in your list of researching websites for your future hosting account.

Now, once you’ve got your hosting setup to take care of and everything is all safe and secure, you want to find out now what Google thinks of your site as far as it is infected or not, then here is a URL for you to check into. Let me just bring this over here. And you can just replace this www.example.com with your URL, like for example this right here. And I’ll show you an example of what it’s going to look like. I think that will work. I don’t think it will need a www in front of mine. Just copy this and paste this in the address right here. And this is the result of what you should get if your page is clean. What is the current listing status for your domain and it will tell you here if your site is listed as suspicious or not? And hopefully, it’s not suspicious and so on. And there’s a host of other goodies over to webmaster tools you can rely on to keep your site safe, secure, and indexed too. But that’s a story for a different video.

Now, if you already have a hosting company and you do not want to move, then you might want to consider some type of site monitoring service and you can set one up like what I’m about to show you and it’s free or there are free services and there are paid services that will monitor your website on a constant basis. Now, both paid and free have their pros and cons, and you can do a search for website monitoring service and come up with a little over 150 million results. So there are no shortages of options to choose from here.

But let’s go ahead and look at a way that you can do this for free and it’s going to take less than 5 minutes to set up and this is called Google alerts for malware. So what you want to first figure out is a list of all the keywords that you want Google to alert you about if they happen to pop-up on your site. For example if your WordPress site has nothing to do whatsoever with pharmaceuticals and you want to be alerted the first time that something ends up on your site having to do with Cialis or Viagra or porn or any other type of keyword that you know you didn’t have anything to do with putting in your site, and it shows up there. If you want to be alerted to that? Here’s how you do it.

I’m going to go ahead and pull in my handy dandy little timer here, set it 5 minutes. Let’s go and start this off. Now, we want to head over to Google alerts, and I believe it’s Google.com/alerts, I believe. Yes, it is. Here’s the search courier that you want to put in there. You want to put in site:yourdomain.com or whatever your domain is and then you want to put in space and then the keywords that you want to search for.

Let me just show you that on this text document here. Right here. This is the way you want to put in, site:yourdomain and we place with this your actual if it’s .info, .com, .org, whatever. Space, then the keyword you want to search for and then space and the word “or” space another keyword. So for example, Cialis space or space Viagra space or space whatever else you want to put in there that you want to be alerted about. And then once you do that… let’s get this out of the way here. Then, result type. I’d say everything. And you can always come back and adjust this later if you’re just getting too much information.

Hopefully, you won’t get any information, that’s the goal here. How often? I’d say at least once a day. Remember this is free, so why not? How many? Only the best results? I’d say, all results. And then your e-mail address that you want the alerts to be sent to. Then click on “create alert” and you’re good to go. Now if you have several alerts in here, because maybe you’re fluent with Google alerts, then you can go here to manage your alerts, to go and edit any alerts that you have set up or to see if you need to make any adjustments on any of those current alerts you’ve got already created.

And there you go, you see, you were able to do this site monitoring for free and under 5 minutes. That’s going to bring us to the end of this video on Site Monitoring and Webhosting: The secure way.

Thanks for watching and you have a great day.