New security for the site

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(Image by JanBaby via Pixabay.)

A couple of readers — okay, several readers — have written to me complaining about the outages on the Hypergrid Business website, so this morning I’ve been following up with tech support at my hosting company, Dreamhost.

One of the things was trivial — the https:// security was in place, but http:// links weren’t automatically redirecting to the https, giving people a “Site not secure” warning in the browser bar. That’s now been fixed.

The other thing that I’ve got in place to protect me against malware is Sucuri, which is supposed to continuously monitor the site for any malware, and automatically clean it up. They’ve been working fine for years, then, all of a sudden, two separate outages, each lasting more than three days, and problems getting through to people and getting things cleaned up.

Sucuri costs $200 per year for one site. I get a discount because my account is grandfathered in — I signed up several years ago. But even with the discount, it’s pretty steep. It was worth it when they were fixing everything immediately, but with two outages right after another, I’m now having my doubts.

I use the Dreampress service, which costs me around $230 a year for the managed hosting. They’ve been really good at keeping the site up and running well, and I haven’t run into any capacity issues, even in months with more than 300,000 pageviews. Today I saw that they also offer a security service, for an extra $3 a month, where they continuously monitor the site for malware and clean it up when anything happens.

I’ve had very good experiences with Dreamhost’s human support, and they have a fantastic and user-friendly interface. The company also invests a lot in automation, which helps make the services more affordable.

I’ll probably keep both in place for a few months or a year, and if the Dreamhost service does well, I’ll drop Sucuri.

If anyone wants to know more about my experience with either Dreamhost or Sucuri, feel free to email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Meanwhile, to everyone who’s been sending me story ideas and press releases — I’m sorry that I haven’t been on top of things lately. I’ve been writing a lot of big feature articles about artificial intelligence at my day job.

Maria Korolov
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