System security is what comes to mind first when talking about hosting security. Everyone knows that there are people out there who spend their time trying to “hack” servers. Many are not aware that for any well known site, there are hundreds or thousands of automatic attempts per day.
A firewall is the first component that sees and filters incoming users and traffic. We use firewalling edge switches and internal Linux firewalls.
After a firewall, the incoming user can access the applications that are made available on the web. Whenever relevant, we use standard hardening procedures to reduce the possible security issues to a minimum. Logical separation of networks is used to make access from one type of network to another physically impossible. For example, the control and administration network is completely separated from the internet facing network.
And last but not least, systems need to be up do date at any moment as the security of a server changes with “hackers” making “progress” or vulnerabilities are discovered in existing software. We are patching all our servers whenever a relevant security patch is released in order to avoid any unnecessary risk.
We believe that data security should not be a question or additional quote and invoice. In order to protect your data from being lost, we completely back up all our servers that host our customers websites. This means that with most of our solutions you are automatically protected against data loss. If we are hosting machines owned by you, backup is not automatic but we can of course provide it where needed.
This also means that you can ask us at any time to restore an accidentally deleted file from backup.
For websites we can even go further than that. Our customers can choose to use our go-live tool. This tool “pushes” every file that goes live though version control software. This represents an extra backup of your website and allows for roll-back to any older version of the site. Roll-back is very useful if a bug is discovered after a major site update, the previous version of the site can be restored while the bug is being resolved.
The physical security is managed by Ironmountain, our housing provider. The data center has 4 types of access control:
