If you’ve been around the web industry any length of time you’ll be aware that running a WordPress site on your own sever these days is pretty much ongoing warfare against hackers, malware and other malicious activity. Furthermore, it can drive you to despair trying to find a simple and cost-effective solution to protect your sites, particularly if you have multiple WordPress sites for clients.
Thankfully there’s a new WordPress plugin that I have been trialling for a few weeks, called cloudsafe365, and my initial impressions are that it’s the answer to every WordPress site owner’s prayers in terms of security and backup.
Cloudsafe365 prevents and reports hacking attempts, prevents content theft, and has one of the best backup and restore functions available for WordPress – all in a single plugin. I installed it on two of my clients’ sites recently as a trial. A couple of weeks later, I got a report to say a bot had hit one of the sites in multiple attacks. The good news is cloudsafe365 stopped it doing any damage.
The report from cloudsafe365 showed this particular bot was attempting to impersonate Bing. The same bot was identified in different attacks from a whole range of IPs from all around the world. Adding them all up, the total came to around 16,000 individual attacks.
When I look at the daily reports from cloudsafe365, showing the amount of suspicious activity taking place on my clients’ sites, I wonder how I ever slept at night without it. One thing is for sure, the amount of malicious activity on the web is only going to get worse over time, so you absolutely need a plugin like cloudsafe365 to give you peace of mind.
It shows you all the legitimate robots, like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc as well as the non-legitimate ones. These can be in form of content stealers, hackers and general scrape attempts and nasties trying to hack into your site – sql injections, meta injections, brute force attacks, command line based attacks etc. You can whitelist any of these if you are comfortable with allowing the particular bot/scraper/hacker through.
Real time site backup
The other great feature of cloudsafe365 is that it is continually backing up your WordPress site. With the free version of the plugin, it puts the backup on your current web server. You then have an option to copy this manually to the cloudsafe365 remote system (hosted with Amazon Web Services). There is a premium version of cloudsafe365 (which costs $15 per month) that provides automated backup directly to the cloudsafe365 AWS server. With both versions, you can restore data easily with one click. It’s an absolute gem.
A third benefit of cloudsafe365 is that it prevents people right-clicking on your page and copying content, and also stops the copy select all command.
Having seen the benefits of cloudsafe365, I now install it as standard on all WordPress sites. If you are web designer or web company building sites for clients, I recommend you do the same. Even the free version is pretty darned good, or you can get extra peace of mind and more detailed reporting for just $15 per month, per site. There are Pro and Enterprise versions coming soon at around $40 and $350 per month respectively, for web companies and those managing multiple WordPress sites.
More information at www.cloudsafe365.com.