How to Protect Your Small Business Website from Malicious Attacks, Accidents and Disasters

You and your team work hard building a small business website to support your main business; to some, the small business website IS the business (e.g. online shops, membership sites, business blogs, etc.) You can’t afford to lose important information or lose business because your website is infected or hacked.

We can’t deny it – no matter how hard you try to secure your business website, hackers seem to be able to find ways to compromise your site’s security. Did you know what a compromised security can cause you? Website defacement, stolen important data, inserting codes to track keystrokes, and many more. A total disaster, when they hit your business website.

As a webpreneur, I occasionally experience those. I have had one of my sites defaced; I have had another one injected malicious codes on regular basis, despite some security measures I do; Noobpreneur.com? Hacked several times.

I’ve added some website security scripts and plugins, but like I mentioned early in this article, hackers are smart people – they are able to find ways to hack your business website. I even heard that hackers can easily hack websites protected with SSL.

Please bear in mind, all of those security tools and procedures are meant to slow hackers down – not hack-proof your business website.

What to do?

I’m not an expert in Internet security, but I do know one great habit that can save you from disasters: Backup, backup, backup.

Yes, it’s a boring chore and you don’t like to do it on regular basis. But it’s a must-do, and if you neglect it, you risk your small business websites and your business continuity – not mentioning tarnished reputations for running a business website with security holes in it.

Unfortunately, many – if not most – website owners are downplaying the importance of backup. They usually realise that they should have backups of their websites AFTER their websites hacked. Recovery can be done, but it’s expensive.

The best way is to be prepared, just in case. Remember – “prevention is the best cure.”

How to backup your business website

In general, there are two paths you can take in backing up and securing copies of your business website:

1. Generate local copies: Just download all the files related to your business website, and store it in either your laptop/PC or your web hosting account.
2. Store backups on online file storage account: Have your backups stored in online file storage or cloud storage account.

Both of them are good ways to store your file backups. The latter is more recommended because storing your files “in the cloud” can give you one major benefit: Can be accessed from anywhere, with or without your own computing devices, and file security (just make sure the online storage solution protects your data well.)

However, there is one issue that can’t be solved by the above: You do need to backup manually, on regular basis. If you run one or two business websites, this shouldn’t be a problem; however, if you run dozens – if not hundreds – of websites, backing up files will be a major problem.

I have recently tested a great site backup solution – available for free – and I strongly recommend this new solution to solve your site backup issues: CodeGuard. The best thing the solution does is to solve your manual backup issues; indeed, it automates backup process and more.

CodeGuard can help you protect your business website from hack attacks, accidents or disasters. The idea is simple: Just enter some details and CodeGuard will automatically backup your files and store them online.

Your site is closely monitored; when something is changed, you will receive notification about the changes – so you can keep track changes that you really do (including those that are unauthorized.)

When things go wrong, you can just restore CodeGuard-generated backup files. The free plan requires you to download the backup files and restore them manually. The paid plan offers you automatic file restore.

I think the basic plan is sufficient for a typical small business website. However, if you want to automate the backup and protection process, you might want to explore the paid plan, starting from $10/month.

Need a recommendation? CodeGuard is endorsed by Matt Cutts (THE Google engineer) among some others – so it must be a proven solution.

If you are interested to try CodeGuard’s features, you need the code to activate the free unlimited membership. We do have such a code; just visit CodeGuard and enter this code upon registration: NOOBGUARD.

Please check CodeGuard out and do let me know how it goes.

Ivan Widjaya
Securing small business websites