Website security on small business websites, protection from hackers and ongoing website maintenance.

Business Website Information

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Website Maintenance and Ongoing Security

website security Website maintenance and security are issues that must be addressed on today's Internet. Hackers are a real threat to business websites and they are constantly looking for websites to take over and exploit. Some hackers look for website forms from which to send spam messages. This could mean people receiving the most pernicious spam labeled as being from your business website. They say that any publicity is good publicity - but not in this case!

You should therefore ensure that your designer will construct a secure website for you. If you have an ecommerce site or a database driven site there may be a requirement to upgrade it regularly with security updates to the ecommerce software package that is being used.

This will help to minimize the chances of anyone hacking into it. You can talk to your website designers about a website maintenance contract where they would be responsible for delivering any software upgrades that become necessary.

Most web designers will agree an annual maintenance contract for a reasonable fee but ensure that you have a service level agreement (SLA) with them. A service level agreement details what you get for your money in any website maintenance or support contract. If this is carefully specified you will know exactly what to expect from your web designer.

Backing up your Website and site Maintenance

website backup and copy If you have used an FTP client as described on our publishing a website page then you will know how to save a back up copy of your website on your local PC. If you are unable to do this then you need to look at some other way of retaining a copy.

Your designer may not keep a copy so you must ensure that you have one available if something happens to your website. Your hosting company should ensure that backups are made so that there is little chance of your website data being lost but it is not unknown for this to happen. Just recently we had a plea from a previous client whose hosting company had lost the contents of a server. They contacted him to ask him to upload his site again but he did not have a copy. Fortunately in this instance we had retained a copy.

You can ask your designer to provide a copy of the website on CD but there are other easy ways of saving it. For example, if it is a small website and you are using Internet Explorer for browsing you can visit each of the pages of the website and save them individually. To do so just go to each page in turn. Click the “file” menu option at the top of your browser window then select “save as”. You can then name the page and save it a convenient place on your hard disk or wherever you want to keep the copy.

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