Living in a safe neighbourhood – why where you host your WordPress site is more important than you think.

The neighborhood we personally choose to live in defines our lives in many ways.  The quality of the air we breathe, the noise we are subjected to, the services locally available to us, the level of security we feel (and experience), the cost of insurance is set by our postcode as assessed by the implied risk, and whether in general we feel secure in our community.

What would a community be like to live in if it had the following characteristics?

• High density living (small apartments or rental homes)
• All rentals
• Highly congested roads
• Shared access to sparse services
• High turnover of tenants
• Properties not maintained
• Black market sales
• Graffiti, and
• Criminal activities

What do you think would be the cost to trying to run a legitimate business in that community?  Would visitors feel safe visiting your business?  If on the way they found that your neighborhood was blocked because of criminal activity under investigation do you think they would come back?

Sure, the council may advertise that they have security patrols and once a month they pick up the rubbish and clean the streets but the properties remain unkempt and the anonymous neighbors come and go leaving a mess behind them.  Meanwhile the council claims that they provide affordable safe living while also dealing with a high churn of residents…

Over the other side of town is a small exclusive safe neighborhood estate with well maintained properties, well behaved and conscientious residents, where all visitors are welcome and secure in the knowledge that they are safe and in a good neighborhood. Services and access are well provisioned and any maintenance issue responded to immediately. If an undesirable tenant should find their way in they are subject to high security and unable to carry out their business.  Any transgressions are quickly detected and shutdown and the undesirable evicted.

Where would you rather live?

WordPress hosting suffers from the same neighborhood effect. A bad neighborhood equates to shared hosting on server farms with anyone and everyone including those that misbehave.

The shared hosting business model is high utilisation and high density – the more hosting they can squeeze into the same server the more profitable it is. The attraction is obviously price and the operator will explain that they are secure and perform regular updates (WordPress core only for managed WordPress hosting). What they don’t advertise is that the other sites on the server will affect your site.

If a spammer sets up shop next door then your IP address will be blacklisted. Same for the mail server. And if sites are not updated regularly (core, plugins, themes) they will be exploited by hackers also attracting a blacklist from Google. So wouldn’t it be better to be on a server where every site on there is fully maintained (all updates, not just WordPress) and any spamming or Malware is quickly detected and eliminated or the user evicted before the neighbors are affected?

A recent customer utilising our WordPress Assistance was suffering lots of small issues with their installation. They had recently moved hosts to escape from a server that was regularly blacklisted with unresponsive support. Their new host promised that their business grade hosting was secure and well supported due to their size and that they would even migrate the site for free. The migration did not go well and a recent check of the mail hosting and hosting IP addresses found both to be blacklisted. They could not receive emails from their web site most likely because of the blacklist and the hosting company is scratching their head. How much is this costing their business and reputation? Was it worth the savings? Unfortunately we will never know.

We offer “safe neighborhood” hosting on our own server where every site is under management.

• All updates are carried out within a contracted time and any issues resolved.
• All sites are regularly scanned for malware and backed up before each update and the backup stored off site.
• Uptime is monitored and all backend activity monitored and reported.
• We also install a firewall to stop attacks before they start and throttle visitors who are behaving in a suspicious way.
• Our outgoing mail is piped through a server provider that measures activity and provides proactive reputation reporting and disciplinary action against spammers ensuring your email will not be blacklisted and will always get through.
• Residents in our safe neighborhood have more time to concentrate on their business rather than tinkering with WordPress.

In summary, our WordPress Managed Hosting neighborhood is safe, friendly, spacious, and never congested and all properties are shiny and well maintained.  Our tenants tend to be long term because they enjoy the security and personal service of our safe neighborhood hosting.

If you are concerned that your business is being affected by bad apples on your shared server please contact us to for a review of your current hosting and site. We won’t provide high pressure sales tactics or put you on some list. Our passion is to provide an environment and system that ensures your business is safe and secure and allows you to do what you do best rather than wasting time tracking down problems with hosting or WordPress or missing emails.

We look forward to seeing you in our safe neighborhood!

About: ManageWP® Australia provide WordPress Site Care and Server Management to site owners and designers. We also provide secure hosting and relocation services if required. We do not design web sites although we are happy to make changes to existing designs where appropriate. We will NEVER approach you to redesign your site as our focus is security (server and site), recover-ability, monitoring, and restoration. Please contact us if you would like an assessment of your current server or site security or need some assistance or advice with your site.