Web hosting is one of the mandatory services required to have an Internet presence whether you have it for a personal blog on WordPress or a large scale ecommerce storefront that uses PayPal and Zimbra Hosting Services offers several levels of hosting to accommodate all types of websites. When the term “website security” is mentioned, many people think about financial transactions, but that is only one part of the story.
In general website security relates to the level of protection your web host provides against malicious hackers who have the ability to interfere with operation of your website. This can be done by exploiting the vulnerabilities in certain scripts used to perform various functions on your pages. “Cross Site Scripting” (XSS) is the common term for this activity but the impact of this can be very serious. Your web host must have safeguard in place to prevent access to your files to prevent this from happening.
The first line of defense on an Apache web server is to make sure that the root directory of your website is blocked from the search engines, in other words you want to make sure that no one can access your files from the Internet. The simple way to prevent this is to make sure that there is an “index.html” file in your root directory.
But to completely block access to your web server directory, you need to ask your web hosting company to make sure that the instruction: “Options –Indexes” is included in the “.htaccess” file. The purpose of this file is to relay instructions to the server and because of this may be “hidden” from normal view.
Search engine optimization is important for your website to be listed in the SERPs (search engine results pages). While there is a lot of focus on content, linking and applications, the way your web host server is configured also plays a significant role in how effectively all of these features come together to be accessed by the robots that gather information about your website.
If these robots encounter certain types of codes on your website, it can cause your site to be listed as an “attack site,” be reported as a site that uses “malware” or be dropped from the search engine index altogether. You can rely on Zimbra Hosting for top-level security to prevent this from happening to your website.