Security & SSL - Page 6

As we look forward to 2016, it has become a bit of a tradition here at A2 Hosting to take a moment to look back on everything we’ve accomplished over the previous year. When looking back, it’s particularly satisfying to see the majority of our major accomplishments aligned directly with our overall goal; making sure you get the fastest page load speeds possible.

With the upcoming release of Drupal 8 on November 19th, Drupal users have something extra to be grateful for this Thanksgiving. After all, it’s been almost 5 years since the release of Drupal 7.0. While Drupal 7 included many improvements and new futures compared to its previous versions, the same can be said about Drupal 8. What are some of these improvements?

Google has begun to roll out algorithm updates intended to remove hacked site spam from their search results. The goal of these updates is to help keep their searchers and users safe by removing these potentially harmful sites from their search results.

It’s been just over a year since we launched A2 Optimized WordPress. The goal of A2 Optimized WordPress was to take the guesswork out of how to get the fastest page loads and most secure settings. It is safe to say A2 Optimized WordPress has been a success with optimized WordPress sites loading up to 6X faster than non-optimized sites. A2 Optimized WordPress is available on all of our Hosting packages and we have since have made it available to all WordPress users regardless of their host (with a few feature limitations).

According to a recently published Google study, hacked sites are up 180% over the past year. In an effort to help keep your websites and account from becoming another victim, we are excited to announce that we are rolling out our new security solution called Patchman. Patchman is a multi-function security tool that provide the following 3 services free of charge! We are rolling out Patchman on all Shared SSD Hosting accounts and on HDD servers numbered 81+. As Patchman requires cPanel, we are also investigating ways to offer this service on our Reseller, VPS and Dedicated Servers as well.

If you are a Magento user, you’re probably well aware of the fact there is a beta version of Magento 2 currently available. Since this is a beta version, you won’t want to upgrade your production site quite yet. However since this beta version will eventually lead to a stable version, now is as good of a time as any to start planning your upgrade. That way you can get the fastest and most secure version when Magento 2 becomes available.

One would think that a strong password is one that contains special characters, numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters. This can be true, but it has been shown that all a password needs to be is long. Lets take a look at two passwords and compare their strength.

From time to time, our support team receives the following question:

For anyone who doesn’t know, Shellshock is the name of a particularly nasty vulnerability in Bash, the standard shell for most Linux distributions (and other Unix-like systems.) As of press time, new vulnerabilities due to this bug are still being discovered. Some distributions have only released patches that fix part of the problem, and a vast number of Internet connected computers are unpatched and vulnerable. There’s bound to be some negative outcomes from a security problem like this, but let’s see if we can scrape out some positive results.

When searching through all of the potential plugins to install on your WordPress site, you may notice that many of the popular plugins have to do with security. This may seem very tempting to let a plugin handle all of your security needs for your site but, security plugins forget one important fact about the web: if your site is too slow for people to navigate it, people won’t visit your site.