- Performance & Reliability. Low-cost hosting companies achieve low prices by oversubscribing their servers. That means that during periods of high activity, these servers are prone to slowing down and crashing. We see this routinely with customers who have hosted at GoDaddy and other low-cost hosts. NDIC undersubscribes, which means our servers are always fast and there is always room for your site to grow.
- Better Security. Because we manage more than 90% of the sites we host, there are very few external users of our servers and all of those users are well-known to us. Fewer users and no anonymity means that we are much less prone to hack attempts. We also employ advanced security solutions (described below).
- Single Point of Contact. If we help manage your site and host your site, you have only one call to make if anything goes wrong. This is particularly important when there is an urgent issue since you don’t waste time trying to figure out who to call. It also eliminates cases where your web developer says the problem is with the host and the host insists the problem is with the web developer and you are stuck in the middle trying to sort it out.
- Advanced Services Included. As part of every account, we include the following services:
- High availability, redundant DNS service to ensure the domain is always accessible from anywhere.
- A backup server at our secondary data center maintains a copy of your data and can be switched over to in the event of an outage at the primary data center.
- DDOS protection: Distributed Denial of Service – This protects against the site getting flooded with bot traffic.
- CDN: Content Delivery Network – Distributes your content around the world so it’s closer to your visitors, speeding up your site.
- Web firewall: Protects against SQL injection and other web hacking attempts.
- Multiple levels of firewall protection: Each server is protected by our edge network router/firewall as well having a firewall running on the machine itself.
- SSL: all sites come with SSL by default which can be turned on at any time.
- Daily onsite and offsite backups.
- 24/7 monitoring and automatic response to any outages.
The NDIC WordPress Platform
- Out of the box, it is vulnerable to being hacked and, in fact, hacking of WordPress sites is on the rise.
- One of its benefits, the large number of 3rd party plugins, is also a drawback as these plugins can make the site even less secure and/or cause the site to load more slowly.
- As a result of the above, WordPress and plugins are constantly being updated, creating a burden on site owners to upgrade frequently. Updates are good, but they can result in new problems being introduced, such as the site crashing or elements on the page disappearing or moving.