Important! Web Hosting Security...

Most hacked websites aren't hacked by a genius in a hoodie. They're hacked by a bot that scans thousands of sites an hour, looking for a WordPress install nobody has touched since the day it went live.

I spent six years on the support desk at a big hosting company before I opened my own shop. I took that call more times than I can count: "My site is sending people to a pharmacy website I've never heard of." Nobody thinks it'll be them. Everybody thinks their site is too small to be worth attacking.

Small doesn't mean safe. Small means nobody's watching.

Why WordPress sites get hit

WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla run a huge share of the web, and their code is open for anyone to read. That's mostly a good thing. But it means every known vulnerability gets cataloged, and the bots test your site against the full list whether you've ever heard of it or not. An out-of-date plugin is a door left open with a sign taped to it.

Once someone's in, they can reach whatever your site stores. Customer details, login credentials, order info. That's lost revenue, a bruised reputation, and sometimes a legal problem, and it all started with a plugin update nobody was responsible for.

What cheap hosting actually gets you

Budget shared hosting puts hundreds of sites on the same server. When those accounts aren't properly separated, one neighbor's abandoned site gets infected and the trouble spreads. You didn't do anything wrong. You just live in a building with bad locks and a landlord who doesn't answer the phone.

And malware isn't always loud. Plenty of infections stay invisible to you while they redirect your visitors, inject spam pages, or quietly send junk email from your server. You find out when Google slaps a warning on your listing, or when your invoices start landing in customers' spam folders because the server's address got blocklisted. By then the damage has been compounding for weeks.

What a host should actually give you

• A real firewall, not a checkbox on a sales page.
• Malware scanning that runs on a schedule, with a person who acts on what it finds.
• Backups stored somewhere other than the server they're protecting, and tested before you need them. A backup nobody has ever restored is a rumor.
• Updates to your CMS and plugins that actually happen, on time, handled by someone whose job it is.

If your current host sells all of that as a paid add-on after you've been hacked, you've learned something important about your current host.

We host and manage websites for small businesses here in Delaware, and security isn't the upsell. It's the job. If you can't say when your site was last updated or backed up, that's worth five minutes of your time. Get in touch and you'll get a straight answer.