When you host a website, you host tonnes of data on the hosting servers. Considering the rising cases of data breaches and cyber attacks, data protection becomes highly critical. As a website owner, you are responsible for securing the customer data that they entrust you with. This is why data security takes precedence for a website owner.
Data security refers to an infrastructural setup where data is stored only where the owner wants it, and no one has access to it without the owner’s permission. Though this is a bit of an oversimplification, it’s the basic idea. You store your site’s data on a server, and no one can access it unless they have your permission.
Data security is compromised whenever there is a theft of data. This could be through DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, MitM (Man-in-the-Middle) attacks, social engineering, or any other cyber attack. Obviously, the theft of data isn’t desirable. You might lose critical business files, customer data, or even financial records. It’s disconcerting to note that cyber-attacks are steadily on the rise.
In the last few years, data security has been a major concern for all businesses that have an online presence. People are sensitive about how their data is stored and protected. Governments across the globe are introducing data security regulations too.
Finally, it’s not just a loss of data from malicious hackers that is an issue. Routine hardware failures can also cause loss of data, and that is detrimental to data security as well. Data security deals with combating both these problems that website owners have to face. This is where Cloud Web Hosting can play a crucial role.
What is Cloud Hosting?
Cloud Hosting is a type of web hosting where the data of your website is stored across multiple servers. This type of hosting offers many advantages in areas like speed and reliability. The use of multiple servers ensures high data redundancies and is one of the major benefits of Cloud Hosting.
However, data security is where Cloud Hosting really shines. From the design of the environment to implementation of the design, Cloud Hosting has jumped leaps and bounds in terms of data security. This article looks at those advantages closely.
Benefits of Cloud Hosting for Data Security
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Isolation in case of server infections
In traditional hosting, in whatever form it’s offered, all the data of your website is stored on one server. In case there’s a cyber-attack, you’re looking at data theft from that server, meaning all your website data is at risk.
In Cloud Hosting, your exposure to this type of risk is minimised. Your website data is stored on multiple servers. So, if one of the servers is attacked, all your data isn’t at risk. More importantly, your website will be unaffected. This is because your website will load from data that’s been stored on other servers.
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Data mirroring
In Cloud Hosting, all data is mirrored in real-time. Data mirroring is the process of transferring all the data from one server to another in its exact form. Real-time data mirroring has two advantages. The first is that you’ll never lose any data owing to hardware failure.
The second, and the one that’s of more interest to us here, is that you’ll have a copy of the data even if data does get stolen. Now, while the prevention of data theft is important, a robust data backup and disaster recovery plan is an important cornerstone of data security as well. On that front too, Cloud Hosting has you covered.
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Redundancy
While cyber-attacks get a lot of popular press, a lot of data is lost owing to more common, day-to-day reasons like server failures or hard disk failures. If a hard disk were to fail and you had no backup, you would lose data.
With Cloud Hosting, that’s not an issue. Thanks to data mirroring in Cloud Hosting, all your data is instantly backed up in real-time. This means that any failure of hardware will not result in data loss of any sort.
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Websites with Cloud Hosting are difficult to target
For Websites that are hosted traditionally, all the data of a website can be stolen if the server can be breached. However, it’s difficult to target a website that’s powered by Cloud Hosting as there’s no single, permanent residence, for your website data.
Website data is stored on multiple servers, meaning that a hacker will have to gain access to multiple servers to steal your website data. Obviously, that’s more difficult to do.
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Genuine security concerns have been addressed
Initially, when Cloud Hosting came into the market, there were legitimate questions on security that were raised across the globe. These were generally about the loss of control of data, vulnerability to DDoS attacks, and malware injection attacks.
Over the years, web hosting companies have addressed each of these issues by extensively deploying malware protection, firewalls, antivirus, and DDoS prevention software. Today, the majority of those concerns have been addressed. In terms of sheer improvement, Cloud Hosting is far ahead of traditional hosting methods.
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Cross-platform backups
Within the Cloud Hosting community, cross-platform backups are gaining a lot of traction. Cross-platform backup strategy refers to the act of storing three copies of any data in two different, unconnected, physically separate data farms.
This way, even if the entire data centre is under a cyber attack, no data will be lost. Additionally, the backup that’s stored in a different data centre is updated in real-time as well. So, data loss isn’t just minimal, but will not actually happen at all.
Conclusion
Data security isn’t just important for large corporations; it’s not just the big companies that get attacked. All businesses with an online presence are vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Unfortunately, small and medium-sized businesses often don’t have the resources to deal with this problem as effectively as big corporations.
Cloud Hosting is one way in which you can enhance the security of your website. What’s more, if you choose a Cloud Hosting plan from a leading web hosting company, your website will be even better. This is simply because reputed companies invest more in server and website security, and are also cautious of who uses their platform.
HostGator is a leading web hosting provider that offers SSD-powered Cloud Hosting solutions. With our fully managed Cloud Hosting plans, you also get pre-integrated NGINX Plus Caching, pre-installed cPanel for management, free SSL Certificates and 24×7 dedicated support.
Partnering with a web hosting company that has a proven security record will pay off in the long run. What’s more, you can stop worrying about how secure your website is and start working on growing your business.
