Your website is often the first point of contact for your customers. Even if you drive business through other marketing methods, you still signpost them towards your website when it comes to closing a sale. Your website must showcase credibility and professionalism, and an insecure website can drastically affect both of these attributes.
An insecure website can give rise to vulnerabilities, that could lead to cyberattacks or downtime – putting operations on hold and potentially costing you thousands of pounds, and a knock to your reputation.
Let’s explore five risks associated with insecure website hosting.
Increased risk of cyberattacks
When your website hosting isn’t secure, you’re opening your doors to significant cyber vulnerabilities. DDoS attacks come from several sources, overwhelming your network with excessive traffic to degrade performance and make your website inaccessible. Malware injections infect websites, which in turn impact visitor’s devices – crushing your reputation. Cyberattacks exploit outdated and poorly maintained hosting systems as they’re easier targets which represent a company that doesn’t put security first.
Data breaches and data loss
Weak website hosting can also lead to data breaches and data loss. This includes the potential exposure of sensitive customer or business data, due to the insecurity of the hosting. This could be following a cyberattack, or a non-malicious insider threat. Not only could this lead to reputational damage, but also legal penalties due to GDPR violations.
Poor website performance
Insecure website hosting means it lacks the proper security protocols, resources, and maintenance. This leads to frequent downtime, unpredictability, and slow loading times – frustrating your customers and impacting your overall revenue.
Search engine penalties
Search engines like Google flag websites that have security issues, like malware or phishing warnings. This brings your website down in the search engine rankings (reducing the overall number of website visitors) and deters visitors that eventually find your website in search rankings.
Good search engine optimisation (SEO) brings opportunities into your company, so if search engines punish you due to insecure hosting, you could miss out of potential customers.
Lack of backup and recovery options
Having backup and recovery in place can be a huge relief when things go wrong. So, as insecure website hosting can lead to a lack of backup and recovery options, you could be left with permanent data loss in the event of a cyberattack or breach. This also means that if your server crashes, there’s a chance you’d be unable to restore operations – a huge risk to take.
Conclusion
So, we’d encourage you to assess your current hosting provider’s security features. Insecure website hosting can slow you down, both in terms of short-term productivity and long-term business growth, and even cause your business operations to come crashing down.
Our advice? Choose a hosting provider with robust security measures, including regular updates and monitoring.
If you need any advice, drop us a message and we can help you choose the right option for your business.
