To Host or Not to Host: How Vulnerable Is My Blog to a Security Breach?
As a social media communications professional, I’ve always said that a blog forms a central anchor for your social media strategy.
While other social media channels enable you to engage and interact with your customers directly, it serves as your true “channel”: your blog is where you can speak most directly and at length with your customers. It does take a lot of time to register a domain name and develop a blog, but it is a winning strategy in the long run.
From this point of view, it’s also a critical part of your public relations strategy.
The Overlooked Security Risk
While blogs have been around for a while, they lack a lot of the shiny new capabilities that we as social media professionals love. These days, blogs tend to be out of people’s minds.
It’s just “there”. It’s always been there, it will always be there. This applies to online security as well. With a host of new technologies to evaluate, assess, and deploy, the blog easily gets relegated to the back burner.
Why Your Blog is a Target
Unfortunately, overlooking your blog’s security can be a dangerous approach. The world of online security is facing unprecedented threats and attacks. Your blog is a particularly attractive target for two main reasons:
- Multiple Attack Surfaces: A mature blog provides a number of different capabilities (video, discussions, photos, etc.), each supported by different software components. Each component can have vulnerabilities that can be attacked.
- Malware Distribution: Attackers often target legitimate websites to distribute malware. Blogs are an ideal platform for hosting malware.
Targeted Attacks and Hacktivism
Beyond anonymous attacks, your blog is also vulnerable to targeted vandalism and “hacktivism”. As your online “channel”, it’s an ideal target for anyone who wants to damage your organization’s reputation.
The Hosting Dilemma
Clearly, if you’re not focused on blog security lately, now is an important time to do so. You should ask yourself one simple question: Should I move my blog to a professional, managed hosting service or should I host it myself?
The Benefits of Professional Hosting
A good professional managed hosting service is the best way to meet today’s security threats. Here’s why:
- Up-to-date Security: They keep up on the latest vulnerabilities and keep the platform secure.
- Controlled Functionality: They only provide capabilities that they can reasonably protect.
- Defense in Depth: They have additional layers of security and active monitoring.
- Disaster Recovery: They have good backup strategies and incident response processes.
The Cost of Self-Hosting
A hosting service may cost more than self-hosting, but a successful compromise will cost you far more. In some cases, when self-hosted blogs don’t have adequate backups, the blogs are simply gone for good.
Re-evaluate Your Risk
If you’re already on a good professional managed service, then you’ve already addressed these risks smartly. But if you’re not, now is the time to reevaluate and decide if you want to continue to assume these risks.
Conclusion
To be clear, professional hosting is not a panacea for all possible security issues your blog faces. But it goes a long way to addressing the biggest threats. The world has become more dangerous and what worked fine a few years ago is just not adequate. Your blog is your most important social media asset: it should get the best protection possible. So if you’re self-hosting, you should ask yourself the question today: to host or not to host.
Ann Smarty
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