In order to increase security and give our clients additional piece of mind, we have recently applied the backend + database monitoring plugin Wordfence to all our WordPress driven websites.
The security and stability of the websites we run and host is something our clients take for granted – and so they should. The stability of the web host we have teamed up with last year was of the highest priority and and took us over two months of research and subsequent testing until we finally decided to go with Scala Hosting Cloud and VPS services in summer 2011. While we cannot influence a server’s uptime if we are relying on third party services, we can still make sure we are pro-actively monitoring the server performance and utilise downtime alert services to get notified if and when things get flaky. That’s why we’ve been working with Pingdom‘s realtime notification tool for over three years now. No connection hick-up gets lost and we’re always able to immediately notify the host if a site disappears – however briefly – from the ether.
A logical next step to increase the technical and professional service was to take care of site security and recoverability. As the list of websites we run grew, and manual backups and content monitoring became ever more time consuming, we decided to hunt for a feasible and reliable backup and security monitoring tool. Compared to server uptime watch, website security, which alerts you of unsolicited FTP access, hackers and site manipulation, needs to be applied per site and per domain. This can easily impact the budget to a point where running multiple websites becomes an expensive endevour.
After reviewing a handful of applications, we eventually picked Wordfence in combination with iThemes’ WP Security as the most wholesome and fairly priced. It generates both database and site backups every 24 hours, alerts you immediately in case any unusual and potentially malicious activity takes place on the web’s root level and gives you piece of mind that unexpected sudden quirks in the database can’t go undetected.
Like any other insurance, we hope we’ll never need it.
