Serious about security

The level of malicious online activity (be it attempts to break in, data mine, or simply denial of service) is only ever increasing. The security measures to defend sites against this activity are naturally evolving, year on year, in response. There are many ways to ensure that your site is as protected as it can be, but here we will focus on one of the most affordable and quickest ways: to implement a WAF (Web Application Firewall).

We would recommend getting a “Web Application Firewall” (or “WAF” for short) in front of every website for additional security.

What’s a WAF?

Just like a regular firewall that stops malicious traffic getting into your computer network a WAF does the same thing for a website - working to block intrusion attempts, scraping, hacking efforts, denial of service attacks and the many other methods of breaching website security.

There are a number of WAFs available on the market, here we will compare 2 different ones, the more price conscious option Stackpath WAF and one of the leading WAFs Cloudflare Pro.

What’s the difference between Stackpath WAF and Cloudflare Pro WAF?

The short answer to this question is, for you as a site owner, not a great deal. They both offer good protection, but they way their services are applied and set up is a bit different.

Stackpath WAF
This is a ‘per site’ offering, protecting only the website itself, but requires very little change otherwise. This is our most popular solution and also has a lower monthly cost.

Cloudflare Pro WAF
This is a ‘domain’ level offering, so can protect multiple sites at once if you use subdomains.
It offers superior protection, and also offers protection for your critical DNS service as well as global caching capabilities (which can increase your page load speed around the world) and several other ‘technical features’, but the catch is that it does require a change in your DNS Service provider (and giving us access to your DNS with that), which your IT Support Engineers (if you have them) may not accept.

Summary

Both options are simple add-ons to your existing hosting contract. If you are a hosting client with us, then we will take care of the onboarding and management of the service. Contact us if you have any questions or would like prices for these services.