From the course: WordPress: Building a Secure Site

How to choose a secure WordPress hosting provider - WordPress Tutorial

From the course: WordPress: Building a Secure Site

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How to choose a secure WordPress hosting provider

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- [Instructor] The first step in launching a secure WordPress site is choosing a secure hosting provider. The security of your host can largely affect how secure your site is and how secure it will remain. Hosting is 100% required to launch a website and it's what your site is built on top of so it's not a place to skimp or cut corners. Remember that all websites are made up of nothing but files. Those files are full of code, which is just a long list of specific instructions that are delivered to your browser, Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, et cetera. These instructions tell your browser what to show like photos and texts and how to interact with a user, like what to do if a user clicks on a photo or submits information through a form. All those files need to physically live somewhere. Just like your photos from your last vacation may be stored on your smartphone. If you lose or damage the phone you lose or damage the files. Website files live on a server. When you buy a website hosting you're buying space for your files on a server as well as any other bundled services or support. When shopping for website hosting, keep in mind how that hosting provider services and support will keep your files safe and secure and impact the speed and performance of your website overall. There are quite a few different types of hosting. I personally recommend looking for managed hosting for WordPress websites which as of today is a fairly new concept. But what is managed hosting? Managed hosting means that the hosting package is optimized to suit the unique needs of your site type be it WordPress or WordPress with WooCommerce, et cetera. With managed hosting the resources, tools and support you receive are focused on what that site needs. And that includes focus on safety and security. So for example managed WooCommerce hosting will provide extra features and support that are specifically designed for how WooCommerce works and how it might become vulnerable. So there's also the idea of shared hosting or dedicated hosting. These types of hosting are pretty much on their way out and are not very popular anymore but it's still pretty important to note the difference because one is definitely more secure than the other. So think of shared hosting, like living in an apartment building, other people also live in that building so if they throw a loud party, or start a fire or flood their bathroom you very well may reap the consequences. Large amounts of traffic or malware on a website that is on your shared server can negatively affect your site. Dedicated hosting is more like living in a house. You have your own space on your own server and all of those resources belong to you. What happens on someone else's server is not going to affect you and vice versa. Just remember that these plans are typically more expensive than shared hosting is going to be. A lot of the decisions you make when shopping for hosting depends on the size and complexity of your website. If you're starting a personal blog or a basic brochure website you probably won't need as many resources but if you're starting an e-Commerce website, an application, a large database site, something like that you'll need to look more deeply into security options. The more information you take through a website the larger the risk, and so the more resources are needed. Regardless of what type of plan you choose, there are some things that you need to check off your shopping list when looking for hosting. We'll go into more details about many of these items later, but for now just know that they are hosting must haves for a secure site. An SSL certificate is essential, especially if you're taking information of any kind from your visitors. A CDN provides cloud security which can help stop a DDOS attack before it reaches your websites data center, firewalls will block attacks and viruses from affecting your site. Many hosts provide spam filters that protect your emails and your comment section and security monitoring is definitely a must have in order to catch any problems early. Remember that this is not a complete list but all of these things are good to look for.

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