Ask Cloudbric: Is My Hosting Provider Responsible for Web Security?

web security responsibility

There are several motives and methods that hackers have for attacking your website. For instance, cyber criminals may launch malicious attacks on your website to change content or even change the ownership of your website. Sounds scary, right? Not only do you lose control of your own website, but your account information can also be changed.

This might sound terrifying, but this actually happened in a recent case. Cloudbric was recently contact by a website owner who lost the control of his entire website (identity and references will be anonymous due to privacy concerns). In this specific case, a web hacker illegally gained access to his website, changed the owner information, and even changed the hosting server for the website.

The exact motive behind this attack was not clear, but it goes to show that web hackers can strike at anytime or for any reason whatsoever. Once the website owner got wind of the situation, they immediately wondered if their hosting provider was at fault.

The real question that we should ask ourselves is whether or not our hosting providers are responsible for our personal web security? In this article, we will determine who is exactly responsible for a hacked website and how you should protect your website.

Who’s in Charge of Web Security?

At first glance you could think that the hosting provider is at fault for allowing their hosted website to get hacked and, in this case, allowing the hacker to change the hosting information as well. All that time and effort poured into creating a website is now gone with the click of a mouse.

Going back to our user, since the hosting provider was changed by the web hacker, his original hosting provider told him that it would be extremely difficult to track who hacked their website. This was very unhelpful for our user and really helped him understand that he needs to take web security into his own hands.

Hosting providers are primarily concerned with delivering a cheap, reliable, and smooth hosting service for their end users. Security is typically the individual’s responsibility and this responsibility should not be squarely placed on someone else’s shoulders.

What Do Hosting Providers Care About?

what do hosting providers care about

What you need to know is that hosting companies are not liable for your information when your website is hacked. Their security interests begin and end with the infrastructure that they provide to their end users, not the safety of individual websites.

All the data that is stored inside of the customers’ websites are ultimately viewed as the property of the website owner. This is why it is critical for website owners to learn the importance of web security and to stop blaming others, such as their hosting provider, if their websites get hacked.

When the hacker was changing the hosting information and moving the website to another server, the original hosting provider just assumed that the website owner was moving their website. Once the login information was leaked and the account was moved, then it was already too late.

Ultimately, in this case, by the time the user came to Cloudbric for future protection, they had to create a brand new website. This is why preemptive action is one of the most important steps in creating a secure website.

Protect Your Website BEFORE It Gets Hacked

protect your website

What’s important is that there are great solutions out there to ensure that these situations don’t happen again. Choosing the safest plan from hosting provider can help, but guaranteeing the safety of a website ultimately falls down on the owner of the website. The large majority of web attacks happen at the Application Layer (Layer 7 of the OSI Model), thus having a Web Application Firewall (WAF) will be a vital service.

Cloudbric is the best security solution for all website owners. Our WAF service provides users with comprehensive web security features in one easy to use and convenient package. Cloudbric prevents hackers, crawlers and bots, spammers and DDoS attacks on your website and only allows legitimate visitors to access your site.

Additionally, users can truly take control of their web security by managing their web traffic in their Cloudbric dashboard. The dashboard displays real time tracking of all web attack statistics and allows website owners to block suspicious web visitors with one click.

Although web hosting providers can give you all the tools to create your business website, they are not the responsible party when it comes to web security for your website. Hosting providers tend to solely focus on giving infrastructure to as many users as possible and individual web security may fall by the wayside.

Therefore, web security is the responsibility of the actual website owner. As we outline in our example above, it’s important to protect your website BEFORE any dangerous and costly attacks may strike. Get started with Cloudbric protection today and secure your website!