The site security options on our platform that are under customers’ control

In a previous article dedicated to guaranteed security, we touched upon all the features and functionalities implemented on our servers that help your web hosting customers maintain a secure web presence.

Now we’ll review in more detail the security tools that customers can use to customize the level of protection on their sites according to their particular needs.

All of the security tools are intuitively integrated into the Web Hosting Control Panel.

ModSecurity

This is a very effective anti-hack firewall, which is activated on all our servers. It has been configured to automatically prevent all common URL forgery or “brute force” attacks and forum spamming attempts targeted at your customers’ websites and applications. By default, ModSecurity is enabled for all hosts within a customer’s account. However, customers can control its behaviour from the ModSecurity section of their Control Panels. They can select if they want the firewall to be working in detect mode only, i.e. to only detect all potential inbound threats without taking action, or disable it completely:

‘ModSecurity’ is located in the Advanced section of the Control Panel.

Outgoing Connections

To prevent sensitive data from leaking off a customer’s site to an external host, we have disabled all outgoing connections from the hosting account by default. However, your customers can take full control of the outbound traffic from the Outgoing Connections section of the Control Panel. With a click of the mouse, a customer can disable the restriction on outgoing connections or to allow external connections only for certain IP addresses:

‘Outgoing Connections’ is located in the Advanced section of the Control Panel.

IP Blocking

The IP Blocking tool allows your customers to prevent malicious users or scripts from attacking their sites by blocking the IP address they are coming from. With a click of the mouse, users can deny a specific IP address access to their sites or to a section of their website. They can even block an entire range of IP addresses, since a hacker might use a dynamic IP from a certain network to attack their sites.

‘ IP Blocking’ is located in the Advanced section of the Control Panel.

Password Protected Areas

The Password Protection Areas tool allows users to easily protect a specific folder of their hosting account, i.e. a directory on their site, with a username and a password. This way, when a visitor tries to open a protected folder or a file located inside the folder, a pop-up window will come up asking for the username and password that have been set by the user.

‘Password Protection Areas’ is located in the Advanced section of the Control Panel.

Hotlink Protection

With the Hotlink Protection tool, customers can easily prevent other websites from stealing their traffic resources by directly linking to files and images on their sites.

Customers can forbid hotlinking for the whole domain name or for a specific folder, for instance – an image gallery folder like my-domain-name/gallery/.

‘ Hotlink Protection’ is located in the Advanced section of the Control Panel.

.htaccess Generator

This multi-functional tool allows customers to shield their website contents by password-protecting certain folders, by enabling hotlink protection, by blocking different IP addresses from accessing their website, etc.

The ‘.htaccess Generator’ is located in the Advanced section of the Control Panel.

Extra protection services:

Apart from the security services included by default with each hosting package, your customers can also take advantage of some optional services like:

Whois Protection

Your customers can easily enable Whois privacy protection for their domains so as to hide their personal or business information, which is publicly available by default. We have implemented our own Whois protection functionality, allowing you to offer the feature to your customers at a really competitive price.

SSL certificates

An SSL certificate is a must-have security attribute for any e-commerce site. It encrypts and protects all the sensitive information submitted onto a site (login form details, credit card information, etc.) and serves as a solid proof of the site’s reliability. We offer two types of SSL certificates – standard and wildcard, at good wholesale prices. Recently, we have made SSLs even more affordable by allowing customers to tie an SSL to a shared IP address for free.

Both tools can be found in the ‘My Domains’ section of the Control Panel.

These are all tools and features that customers can make use of to tweak the level of protection we have implemented on our servers depending on their particular security requirements.

Tags: web hosting, online security, SSL certificate, modsecurity

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