Keeping Your Website Safe and Secure With Dotsafe

By Gordon Smith

How safe is your website from hackers?

How often does your website go offline?

When were security patches last applied to your website software?

How fast does your website run?

These are four key questions that every diligent business owner needs to know the answer to.

All businesses rely heavily on their websites to provide information to potential clients or to directly sell products or services.

Because of this Dotwise have developed a unique monthly website maintenance package that we call Dotsafe!

Dotsafe is the website security package that keeps your site as hacker-proof as possible at all times, whilst keeping all your site software up to date and ensuring that your site can be brought back online in the event of a disaster!

Backup

Like any digital asset, your website requires backups on a regular basis.

Without these, if your website crashed you would not be able to recover it, leading to maybe hundreds of hours of lost work. Different websites need different backup schedules. For an e-commerce site, taking orders all day, daily backups (or even hourly) are vital.

Whereas for informational websites, perhaps once a month might be sufficient. Either way, with Dotsafe your backup schedule will be set and rigorously adhered to.

Restore

Backing up your website is only half the story. The other half is restoring it to full working order. There are many reasons why backups may be corrupt. But if your backup does become corrupt, it is useless. It's as if you did not take a backup at all.

The only way to verify and prove that a backup can be restored when needed, is to actually restore it. To do this, we restore your website offline to our own servers here at Dotwise.

We rebuild a complete, working version of your website. Only then will we sign off your backup.

Updates

Out of date software is by far the easiest and most common way for hackers to gain entry to your website.

Hacking can cause a real headache.

Usually it is as simple as website defacement - where the hacker leaves unpleasant messages on your website for all to see.

Sometimes it can take the form of a ransom demand. Other times, hackers may steal vital customer data such as usersnames, email addressed, personal information or even credit card data. Whatever the hackers get up to, it is a real headache and extremely damaging to your business.

Open source website building software such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla is particularly vulnerable. To mitigate against hacking you need to ensure that your website software is as up to date as possible. This means keeping all your software, including plugins, website builders etc. fully up to date. You can do this yourself (if you know how). But will you remember to do this month after month for years?

That's where the Dotsafe update process comes in handy.

We'll log into your website once per month, scan for out of date software, update all your plugins and core website software and report back on which software we updated. When the hackers find your website is fully up-to-date, they'll usually pass your site by and look for an easier target.

Monitoring

Your website is your company's front door, and should be open 24/7. If your site is frequently offline, you need to know about it.

With Dotsafe, we monitor your website 24/7/365.

We monitor from at least 5 separate physical locations. These can be in the UK, Europe or around the world (depending on where your customers are). We monitor your site and measure speed once every 5 minutes. If your site goes offline our engineers are alerted instantly and can swing into action to resolve the problem.

You can sleep easy, knowing a professional website maintenance company is looking after your website.

FAQ

Do I have to host my website with Dotwise to use Dotsafe?

No, it doesn't matter where your website is hosted. We can work with any hosting providers. We're experienced with dozens of UK and international hosting providers, including WP Engine, Siteground, Kcom, 123-REG, Guru, TSOhost, 1&1, Fasthosts, Heart Internet, UKFast and dozens of others. We know them all.

How much does it cost?

The basic Dotsafe package costs just £85 + VAT per month.

Do you guarantee that my website will be completely hack-proof?

We don't guarantee this.

What we do guarantee is that we will follow all industry best-practices to keep your website fully up to date with all the latest security patches. In the event that your website does get hacked, we can usually fix this quickly (extra costs may apply).

What if my website has already been hacked?

Please do feel free to get in touch and let us know if your site has been hacked. We'll take a look and see if we can fix this.

Once we've fixed it, we would always recommend that you use our Dotsafe service to lessen the likelihood of it happening again.

What reports do I get?

You get a monthly report by email. It tells you:

  • How long your website was offline for during the preceding month;
  • How many downtime incidents there were;
  • What we updated on your website in terms of plugins, core website software and more;
  • Whether we identified any problems that need to be brought to your attention;

How do I get started?

Find out more about our website maintenance service here. 

Just contact us below to get started.