As you can see in our Standard Vs Hosting blog from last year (Outdated in terms of our service but still relevant information) you’ll see an SSL is essential to reassure users that the website they’re looking at matches the domain they’re viewing.  This helps prevents phishing attacks whereby the site you’re logging into may look like Facebook or PayPal but is, in fact, a fake, just stealing your information.

Protecting your site from Hackers, Viruses, and Malware is an important, though sometimes costly undertaking.  It will depend on your day to day use as to whether this is an important task for you, but GoDaddy offers you such services just in case.

GoDaddy’s Deluxe Malware scan, removal and prevention. Plus, performance boost offers the following

There’s plenty of information about each of these features on their website, on the wider internet at large, or available through us; but understanding the details isn’t crucial to using them.  In short, this is a round-the-clock level of protection – a basic firewall to protect from malware, hacker and virus attacks, along with a clean-up solution for removing any that get through.  This service costs approx. £192 per year or £15.99 per month – See More

If you’d prefer to avoid this service, certain steps such as enforcing regular updates, maintaining security standards on the website, and performing regular backups can be significant assets. They’d require you to keep a close eye on the website of course, but nothing too time-consuming.  Maybe browsing it twice a week.

If you would like a malware solution at a more affordable price, their “Essential” package offers:

Essentially speaking, it will scan the site for malware every 12 hours or so and allow you to submit clean-up requests if it becomes infected.  This service can be brilliant if you find your website getting re-infected with malware on a regular basis.  However, this isn’t a fool-proof option, as the infection can permanently damage your site – preventing a repair.  In such a case it would need to be restored from a backup (providing you have a recent backup of the site which does not contain the infection) or you’d need a site rebuilt/built from scratch.  This is around £5.99 per month (though drops to £3.99 per month If you buy for periods of 12 months or more).

Backups are essential.  Whether you use included or paid extra services for those is entirely up to you.  Within the hosting account is an application manager – which will manage and maintain your Joomla.  One of the features it offers is daily backups which can store those backups either on your hosting account or your Dropbox (for off-site security).  These are great but not fool-proof. If a malware infection occurs, the site backup can include the infection.  If the infection goes unnoticed for a week, all of your current backups will have the infections, too.

A managed version of website backups is available at a small cost from GoDaddy.  This starts at £2.99 per month (with 5gb space and discounts for longer term contracts), with the following services: 

It’s important to note, that regardless of the information given here, hosting and web security are constantly evolving fields and you should familiarise yourself with.