Your website is vital to your digital strategy.

Website Backups – nobody has time for that, right?  Well, we all know what it’s like to stay up all night working on documents, presentations, reports, etc.  Have you ever woke up next morning to discover that you didn’t save the final revision?  Or, worse, that your file didn’t save at all?  We have.  It is gut wrenching.

Backing up computer files is something we are reminded of very frequently because we save a lot of important information as well as valuable memories.  We know that we could lose our computer, it can get stolen, the hard drive can crash, or we can accidentally click “delete” at any moment.  Without flash drives and the cloud, our information could be lost forever.

I know you’d rather not, but consider imagining the same thing happening to your website.  As we have already established, your website is vital to your digital strategy and success.  You depend on your website to market your brand, communicate essential information to customers, generate leads, and, for some of you, to process sales transactions.  If your website goes down, you will lose money.  If your website goes down, your brand will take a hit.

Here are the five most important reasons to consider website backups:

1. Host Website Backups are Not Enough

Your host may already be safeguarding your site from hacks and other potential threats, and while many hosts perform rudimentary backups, it’s very probable that their files won’t capture the current version of your website.  That’s not a risk you can afford to take. According to Online Marketing Blog – Not a Grouch:

[clickToTweet tweet=”People think having their web host create backups is good enough, but this is far from the truth.” quote=” A few people I’ve talked to think that having their web host create their backups is good enough, but this is far from the truth. The backups that your host provides are not sufficient to make sure you have a bullet-proof site.”]

Many web hosts don’t perform regular backups unless their users are specifically paying for that service.  Even when hosts do backup information, it will not be immediately available to you in the case of emergency to get your site running again.

2. Your Website is Constantly Changing

If you’re taking the right approach toward optimizing your site for search engines, you’re constantly adjusting your language and refreshing content.  Keeping a backup of your site as it is now is crucial.

Your up-to-date sales letters and blog posts are testaments to how much your website transforms.  Additionally, your website’s databases are a great example of how rapidly your data is changing.  And, if your website has a membership or e-commerce component, most of your valuable content is changing hourly.  So, the only useful data only exists in one place – your current website.

3. The Ability to Respond Quickly

The statistics on hacking are remarkable, if not mortifying.  Forbes states that 30,000 websites are hacked every day.

Thirty thousand websites…  

Unfortunately, it doesn’t even matter how small your business is.  If that doesn’t scare you, three out of five organizations that get attacked are bankrupt within six months.

Nothing is invincible; you can add many security measures to protect your site, but hacks are always a possibility.  When this happens, you will have enough concerns just dealing with passwords (not to mention trying to prevent further attacks).  Routine or daily backups allow you to recover lost, hacked or corrupted files or databases much more smoothly.

And, you won’t have to waste time cleaning code because you can just upload the last working version.

4. You Can’t Put a Price on Peace of Mind

Backup recovery plans are critical so that any website is able to maintain business continuity and achieve efficient, stress-free disaster recovery.  As a small businesses owner, you can’t relate to the huge corporate hacks that often make the news.  Nonetheless, these breaches are a very real threat to small businesses as we mentioned earlier.  Peace of mind is attainable, though, with a high-quality backup solution.

Businesses invest an irreplaceable amount of hours, dollars and resources into developing a website and creating great content.  Although websites are rarely completely “lost”, your content is so valuable, that it is definitely worthwhile to invest in a secure, reliable backup and recovery solution.

Don’t lose sleep worrying about what could happen to your website.

5. It’s Like Having Insurance for Upgrades

Upgrading your website’s core software, or any module, is necessary so you have all the latest security patches in place, but it can go wrong.

Errors can, and do, occur mainly because most software platforms are not created by a single developer.  Most businesses using content management systems, rely on various code snippets that are built by third parties.  A core software or code snippet upgrade, a back-end settings change, or a programming change can bring an entire website down.  Having a good full backup can be a good insurance policy should problems occur.

6. It Can Prevent Losing Content

Data on websites is constantly updated and changing.  If you’ve ever lost all your hard work in a file that was spontaneously corrupted, you can understand how easily it would be for a website full of content to also be corrupted, and it is frustrating to try to recover the content.

Save yourself the stress.

Perform website backups on a regular basis to prevent wasted time and resources.

7. You’ll Have an Extra Security Measure

Whether the attacks are targeted towards your business, your server, or executed at random, they are becoming increasingly sophisticated and challenging to safeguard against.  By backing up your website, you have given yourself the tool to reverse such attacks at minimal expense to your business.

Is Your Website at Risk from Ransomware?

Many of you have heard about the massive cyber attack that has sent much of the world into ‘disaster recovery mode’. This is a great wake-up call to remain diligent and acknowledge the importance of good security practices.

As evidenced over the past few days, security of systems and data are essential for any organization to function. We have seen time and time again, an increasing volume and sophistication of cyber security threats.

Cyber Security Threats Include:

• Targeted Phishing Scams
• Data Theft
• Other Online Vulnerabilities.

Nothing in security is 100% full proof.  It is essential that you, and any staff, are proactive to ensure your systems and data are protected.

It is imperative your website is being maintained and looked after thoroughly with timely core code updates, design security patches, and website backups.

The average computer connected to the Internet can easily and unknowingly be compromised in moments.  As we saw this weekend, many attackers gain entry from simple mistakes or lack of knowledge, like clicking on links in emails from unknown sources.  You play an important role and can help protect your business, your information, and your customer’s information.  Help us help you: stay informed, ask questions when you have them, and stay current with appropriate security practices.

How to Protect Yourself from Ransomware:

1. If you use Windows, install the patch that Microsoft has released to block the specific exploit that the ransomware is using. You can find instructions on in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.  You can also directly download the patches for your OS from the Microsoft Update Catalog.
2. If you are using an unsupported version of Windows like Windows XP, Windows 2008 or Server 2003, you can get the patches for your unsupported OS from the Update Catalog. We do recommend that you update to a supported version of Windows as soon as possible.
3. Update your Antivirus software.  Most AV vendors have now added detection capability to block WannaCry.
4. If you don’t have anti-virus software enabled on your Windows machine, we recommend you enable Windows Defender.
5. Backup regularly and make sure you have offline backups.  That way, if you are infected with ransomware, it can’t encrypt your backups.
6. For further reading, Microsoft has released customer guidance for the WannaCry attacks and Troy Hunt has done an excellent detailed writeup on the WannaCry ransomware.

*UPDATE 9-13-2017*

According to leading website security company, Wordfence, ransomware is now specifically targeting websites and attempting to encrypt website files.

We also recommend that you have reliable backups. It is important that you don’t store your backups on your web server. If, for example, they’re stored in a ZIP archive on your server, then if your site is taken over by this ransomware, the backups will also be encrypted and will be useless. Your backups should be stored offline, either with your hosting provider or using a cloud storage service like Dropbox.

This newfound threat goes to show that hackers are actively trying to extort business owners and cheat you of your hard earn money.

We expect this to evolve over the next few months into fully functional ransomware that targets both your website files and database.  We also expect increasing incidents of extortion.  For websites that do not have a firewall and regular backups, this may turn into a profitable business for attackers who can ransom a few thousand websites.

The fact is that even features added to your website may make your website vulnerable.  Recently, it was discovered that over 200,000 websites were at risk due to code that enabled a feature to make the website more customizable. 

Keep Your Business Safe

We strongly recommend that you install professional website security software, or hire someone to care for your website to protect yourself and your business against these kinds of threats.

We have integrated malware scans into our firewalls as of last fall.  This allows us to use malware signatures that we create to catch ransomware variations in our firewall.  Using this technique can block an attempt to upload ransomware, even if the attacker used an unknown exploit.

Further, we suggest you ensure that you have good offline backups, and do make sure your backups are not on your web server.  Your backups need to be on a separate server or a cloud storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive.  Backups are the last line of defense.  It is better to avoid getting hacked in the first place.

If you have any questions regarding the security of your website, please contact us.