SECURE HOSTING
Enterprise level website security
- Security breaches and exposure to malware are an ever-present threat on today’s web. Our secure hosting keeps you safe against harmful web attacks. We give you the tools to help you save time, money and your reputation. We don’t think that you should be charged for these services.
- Stay a step ahead of online criminals with GrafixHost, at no extra cost.
Automatic malware scanning
We give you a detailed report on the results of this scan in our MyGrafix control panel. This is similar to services provided by some other web hosts – which they charge a premium for!
Should malware be discovered, we can send you an email alert.
WordPress users also have another way to check for malware, through our WordPress Checksum Report in our WordPress Tools suite. This checks that your WordPress core matches the official WordPress repository.
Immediate results
On-demand scanning
Disables PHP Mail
Free wildcard SSL encryption
Our free SSLs are ‘wildcard’ certificates. So you can secure subdomains as well as your primary domain using one certificate. To get a free ‘https’ certificate your site needs to use the validated 20i nameservers. They provide the same level of security as any other SSL certificate.
Our data centres
- ✅ 24-7 security on site
- ✅ Photo ID and swipe card entry
- ✅ CCTV inside and out
- ✅ Gated access and secure perimeter fencing
- ✅ Redundant and uninterruptible power supplies
Isolated backups
PCI compliant UK and US hosting
To accept, store and process debit/credit card information, the hosting provider must be compliant with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS). These standards were introduced to reduce credit card fraud.
The PCI Security Standards Council are responsible for ordering regular tests on hosting providers. They test for vulnerabilities where hackers could potentially steal cardholder information. GrafixHost consistently pass these independent audits.
Anti-spam, anti-virus
All emails and forwarders sent and received are subject to advanced antivirus and anti-spam protection.
We use 3 layers of inbound spam and virus scanning:
✅ Network-level
Commercial anti-spam deny lists from Spamhaus, Invaluement and Barracuda Networks are used to reject mail from known spam networks.
✅ Virus Scanning
Any known malware signatures are rejected.
✅ Content-based
Messages are scanned for spam-like characteristics and filtered into the ‘junk mail’ folder.
Fully configurable email filters
These filters are fully configurable via the webmail control panel. So certain senders, domains and TLDs can be allow-listed to bypass the content filter entirely. The same goes with deny lists: you can create your own from our control panel.
Whenever we reject a message for a known virus or network deny listing, the message is returned to the sender so the sender knows what’s happening. We never ‘black hole’ email.
Spammers not welcome
If you’re using the email accounts included with our shared hosting, you don’t want miscreants to harm your reputation (and ours) by sending out masses of ‘spam’ email.
So we monitor outgoing emails to ensure this doesn’t happen and operate a zero-tolerance spam policy.
Safer than just a password
Unfortunately many security measures are rendered ineffective if your password is compromised. So we offer the option to use two-factor authentication (2FA) for MyGrafix, StackCP and SSH access.
2FA is a way to add an extra layer of security. Our 2FA uses TOTP apps, which provide you with a time-sensitive single-use code to enter as well your password. 2FA app providers include Google and Microsoft. The apps are run from your phone.
We also enforce another form of ‘2FA’: random security checks when payments are made. This will require you to call us and confirm additional security information provided by yourself when first signing-up.
Enterprise-level denial of service protection
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are a growing hazard on the web. They can do extensive damage to a business by flooding the server with requests, so that regular website users are unable to access your website.
If your shared hosting or virtual private server (VPS) is attacked, usually you don’t have much of a choice other than to weather the storm and wait for the attack to stop.
That’s why we introduced 1 Tbps+ anti-DDoS protection. This enterprise-level protection covers you against most attacks. It only filters-out malicious traffic, so you can carry on working without noticing any interruption. Don’t let the hackers ruin your business.
Strong external protections
One way to stop security breaches is to prevent criminals from getting access to your code on the server. Our Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects your data and software by blocking suspicious activity.
A common attack on a website is to use web forms to insert malicious code. Forms aren’t covered by traditional firewalls, as they need to allow information to pass from the user to the server where the website is hosted. They can be an access point for data thieves or ransomware.
Even in the best-case scenario, being a victim of this will cost your business time and money. Worst case: a breach could end your company.
The GrafixHost WAF helps prevent this by inspecting every HTTP request for SQL injection, trojans, cross-site scripting, path traversal and many other types of attack. It does this at the edge of our network, so it happens before any scripts from web apps like WordPress execute. It takes less than a millisecond.
The GrafixHost security team regularly updates the set of rules that filter out malicious requests. This ruleset is made from commercially-available resources and custom rules written by the GrafixHost security team.
All this makes it much more difficult to hack your sites, and goes on behind the scenes at GrafixHost.
Keeping attackers away from your web apps
As well as the firewall, we also operate network defences. These are based on IP address and network-level (automated system) level reputation. They’re designed to block likely attackers before an attack starts.
Suspicious IP addresses and networks are routed to different web servers automatically, so traffic and load is kept away from standard web servers. IP addresses that have a bad reputation are blocked at the network edge, and entire ranges of IP addresses can be blocked too.
Brute-force login protection
A common attack vector for cyber criminals is to use brute force to guess your website’s ‘admin’ password. These are applications that cycle through common passwords and use trial and error – random letters and numbers – to try to crack your credentials.
Our platform includes StackProtect, which monitors log-in attempts to your website. It checks for potential ‘evil’ automated requests. If they’re detected, it uses Google’s latest reCAPTCHA tools and if necessary, blocks those attempts.
This also stops our platform being slowed-down. It blocks up to six million requests – every day. Logins to our WordPress hosting platform are our most popular target, but StackProtect covers all common website logins.
The best platform for security
Autoscaling
A cyber-attack uses up a lot of bandwidth and processing power, even if it’s unsuccessful. Autoscaling resources mean that your site will stay fast and online. At other hosts, an attack on one of your shared hosting ‘neighbours’ can slow down your site. Not so at GrafixHost.
No single point of failure
Our platform has redundancy at every level. In the event of a hardware, software or network failure, automatic failover occurs to bring services back online. This redundant hardware and software design helps availability and mitigate data loss.
Isolated server roles
Lock down your website
Block visitors to your site IP address or country
Our hosting allows you block malicious IP addresses, entire subnets or even whole countries, if you like. That’s up to you.
Website password manager
You can add passwords to areas of websites or whole sites quickly and easily, without having to code.
File transfer denied
Commonly used access systems such as FTP, SFTP, Remote MySQL and SSH are denied as standard and can only be enabled after authentication through the control panel. You can unlock FTP for a set period of time so you can make changes, then it will lock automatically.
File permissions checker
Scan your website files for permission-based errors to prevent unauthorised access. Our File Permissions Checker will recommend and fix errors automatically.
Backups
FTP and SFTP is secured by Transport Layer Security protocols: the same crypto that helps create ‘https’ URLs. So, file transfers are less likely to be read or tampered-with by criminals.
CDN security headers
Manage all of your website’s HTTP security headers in a simple dashboard. You can toggle the policies that allow or deny the passing-on of security-related information between the client and server.
