This will probably be the first and main reason why you'll think you need a backup plan or maybe the reason you read this if you did have recently been hacked into your Web site. Websites can be compromised, especially if you are not familiar with the update on the framework and plug-in side of things. Brute force attacks are internet Bots that search the web for vulnerabilities on websites, from usernames to passwords of the week, weaknesses in a piece of code of a plugin, or WordPress install. The easiest way to keep those attacks on your door is to keep everything up to date on your website, with regular updates and upkeep, and having a viable backup solution is also the key to getting your website back up and running if it has been compromised by a brute force attack.
Even when you keep on top of your framework and plugin upgrades, things can always go wrong, having a viable backup solution in place is the key to getting your site to work again is a lifeguard in these situations. Sometimes an upgrade to a plugin or WordPress may cause conflicts between plugins or part of the encoding in your website. This can knock down your website and sometimes prevent you from connecting to the background of your website, your contact form might stop working, forcing you to lose business as prospective customers think you ignore their e-mails for you. If you have a backup solution in place, you can simply re-install your last backup from when your site was working well to see where everything went bad and have your website up and running.
Hosting Australia provides a fully integrated, off-server backup on selected hosting packages. This means that in addition to our nightly backups, which are included on all Hosting accounts, we also securely store backups based on the following archive schedule:
Because of the way the above backups cycle through, this means we can generally restore backups taken at least 30 days ago and up to a maximum of 60 days, depending on the cycle. We can also restore a backup up to 5 days or 1 or 2 weeks previous if required.
Overnight backups restorations are included with your hosting fees, however, there is a charge to have an archived backup restored, you can view the pricing of this on our PRODUCT PRICING page.
Having a business email always draws unwanted attention. This is great, to have your email address posted on your website, Otherwise, how will clients or users communicate with you?
So you end up receiving countless spam and phishing emails generally with the topic like: "Improve your SEO" "Get your ranking higher on Google”. These emails ultimately flood your inbox and you will never be able to find important emails again.
Luckily there are methods you can put in place to prevent and keep spamming at bay. Let's discuss the three best methods for keeping spam under control.
Log into your cPanel. If you need assistance logging into your cPanel, you can view our Knowledgebase article HERE.
From the Email Accounts page, click Email Filters.
Select Manage Filter, then Create New Filter.
Name your filter in the Filter Name text area.
If you want to filter out certain email keywords that you have noticed are used in the spam email subject lines.
Choose your Roles and enter keywords.
Choose how you wish to deal with the email caught in the filter.
Click Create once you are happy with your filter.
All Hosting Australia hosting services include a basic SPAM Filtering service, called Mail Scanner. This service will deal with low-level spam and provide some form of filtering.
From the Email Accounts page, click Email Filters.
You can use this to allow (Whitelist) or block (Blacklist) all emails from a particular address.
This page will allow you to adjust the filter settings. There are two settings to adjust here, and both are related to SPAM Scoring. Each email filtered via Mail Scanner is assigned a score based on several factors, including Email Content, Location of Sender, Type of attachments, To/From address, and many other factors.
For example, if an email is scanned that ticks all boxes as being deemed legitimate, it will be given a SPAM Score of zero or one.
However, should the email originate from a known SPAM location, have a zip file and a large list of random TO addresses, it would be assigned a higher score, such as 20 or 30.
The two settings available on the Other Settings Page are:
Low Scoring Spam: This setting refers to the lower end of the threshold. And you can set this as whatever score you like. It’s recommended to leave this setting as DELIVER in the delivery options section mentioned below, which makes this setting defunct.
High Scoring Spam: This is the most important option when configuring filtering.
The default setting is 20, but if you are seeing a lot of SPAM Delivered, you may wish to lower this to 15 or even 10. This means that any email reaching 10 or 15, will be handled as per the settings below, which is generally to Delete that email from the queue.
This shows an overview of the settings for all the email domains you have configured under this cPanel account.
From this section you can choose a number of options, they are:
SPAM SCANNING - Choose to disable or enable the scanning process.
VIRUS SCANNING - Choose to disable or enable the scanning process.
DELIVER CLEANED EMAILS - This will deliver emails that are cleaned of virus files. It’s recommended to leave this as "NO" as any virus-laden emails can still potentially contain dangerous links.
LOW SCORING SPAM - Choose what will happen to emails that reach the low-scoring spam threshold, as described above.
HIGH SCORING SPAM - Choose what will happen to emails that reach the high scoring spam threshold, as described above. Choose to disable or enable the scanning process.
The final method is your tried and true to Stop SPAM in its tracks, with Hosting Australia's Powerful Industry Grade email filtering product. 99.98% Accuracy when identifying and filtering SPAM. An incredible 0.0001% Rate of false SPAM Identification.
The SPAMProtect package options include inbound and outbound email filtering and archiving solutions. Powered by a cutting edge continuously updated Intelligent Protection & Filtering Engine to ensure your emails are always protected from threats, no matter how often new attacks emerge.
No contracts. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel as you need to. No risk.
Having a strong password is your first line of defense against online hackers. But you might find yourself having to reset your password a little too often. This can make the entire process frustrating when you are told that the password you have forgotten has already been used.
In frustration, you might want to revert and create an old password and hope for the best. However, this is an easy way to find yourself under a malicious attack after a hacker guesses your password.
So, how do you create a strong and secure password while still being able to remember it? Let’s explore the best strategies for creating and remembering a strong password.
In 2008, security expert Bruce Schneier suggested a new, clever password method. His advice is simple: take a sentence and turn it into a password. Assign each word a series of characters to help you remember it.
You can find some examples below:
The more random and stranger your series of characters the better. So, rather than having to remember a string of random letters and numbers, you’ll just need to remember a sentence.
You have reached your limit; you need to create a new password, but you have run out of ideas.
Luckily there is a site just like passwordsgenerator.net that helps you create a password. This can allow you to select and choose the Length, symbols, numbers, including lowercase, uppercase.
This will help you create a strong password with an easy click of a button.
Use 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication)
Two-Factor Authentication is a security system that requires two distinct forms of identification to access your account.
First, you will enter your newly secure password and then provide proof with something you have, or something you are. You may be required to answer questions about your favorite sports team or first job. You may also download an app on your devices and be required to enter a randomized number within a time limit.
Now that you have created your new strong password. You can test your password strength by visiting howsecureismypassword.net to see how long a computer is to break your password.
During 2020 - 2021 a lot of businesses have been required to make the switch over to an online platform. Without having a functional website before the pandemic, you may have found yourself in a bit of a tough situation trying to learn all the skills to improve your website.
So, if you are looking to learn web development, there are more than enough resources online and it can become overwhelming, not knowing where to begin, and how do you tell if you skills you are learning are useful or out of date.
As an owner of a website, it is important to be able to update your website on the fly. You can learn everything you need to know about web development online, taking the time to learn these skills will help take your website understanding and business to the next level.
Udemy is a massive open online course provider and my person going to for upskilling for anything. Udemy offers over 80,000 online courses in a wide variety of categories including web development. Each course that is offered within a category includes unlimited access to a series of video lectures by a specific instructor Plus you can always interact with the Udemy student community for extra help. Each course is paid separately allows you to preview the lectures for free before you start. They currently have a sale for new users looking for upskills.
You may already be familiar with LinkedIn as it is a must for professionals to connect in 2021. Therefore, LinkedIn has combined Lynda.com for a more personalized learning experience. Rather than taking you through a specific track, the site offers a staggering number of courses in various fields including almost a thousand courses for web development. For $29 a month you get unlimited access to courses that are broken up into a series of videos that are accompanied by walk-through examples and sample code when needed.
Codeacademy allows you to select a path you are wishing to learn, web development for example. The course-based online learning provides a unique hands-on approach to learning code. Each path includes lessons that begin with the basics and sends with advanced practical applications. Each lesson includes written instructions that help you write out actual code that progresses with each lesson.
Codewars is a great choice that allows you to master your web developer skills by solving challenges in the programming languages of your choice. You can even compare your solutions with other users for great understanding and great when learning with a partner.
W3schools does not providers courses as such but is more an index of knowledge that you can have in your back pocket and refer to. I still use W3schools.com to this day if I ever require a refresher on a certain topic.
When it comes to improving or learning a new skill, getting started can be the hardest part. But once you do, you might be surprised a just how much you can learn in a single day with online resources available.
2025.hosting-australia.com/ does also offer web development if you ever find yourself stuck on are wishing to upgrade your website to a newer and more updated version for your business. Just simply contact our support and one of our web developers will be in touch.
A website safety check is simple but effective to prevent future problems. There are multiple ways hackers and other malicious entities could infiltrate your network and website. Once they have access, they will be able to steal your data, use the website for nefarious purposes, they will destroy a business from the inside out. Therefore, it is so important to have a regular website safety check.
So, it’s best not to dwell on the idea of whether you should have a regular safety check that could only take a few hours. But save days, weeks, or even years of work.
So, this is a checklist that you can follow to make sure your website is safe.
You may have noticed that some websites have HTTPS:// before www. This is extremely important as the S in HTTPS stands for the Secure Socket Layer. Which encrypts traffic between the user’s browser and your website. This becomes so important; Google is now factoring the existence of an SSL into its SEO formula. This not only improves security but all the searchability of the website.
It is important to have your software and plugins up to date. You can easily update your plugins through the WordPress admin area. While you are updating your plugins, it's also important to remove plugins that are no longer required. Hackers can buy an out-of-date plugin, update it, and add their own malicious code. Then when the plugin is updated, you have the newer compromised version of the plugin. The hacker then uses this plugin as a backdoor into your site, risking all your and the user’s data.
As mentioned before “It’s not a matter of if your website gets hacked, it’s when it will be”. I have seen firsthand entire websites that have been devastated by malicious attacks. Losing all their content and not having a backup to fall back on. Luckily, 2025.hosting-australia.com/ is backing up your cPanel and provides an off-server backup service. However, it is important to have your own personal backup. It doesn’t hurt to have two separate backups in case one of them fails. You can easily backup your cPanel, check your HA knowledgebase article for more information.
Pay attention to extra files you post on your website and include them in your website safety check. Any file that is uploaded such as, images, excel, Word, and PDFs may be corrupted.
Use complex passwords, with various letters, numbers, and special characters. WordPress also has an arrangement of plugins such as Limit Login Attempts Reloaded that are made to stop brute-force attacks and ban IP addresses.
A lot of people create a WordPress admin. But leave the username as “admin”. This is the first username hackers will use when they attempt to brute force into your website. Therefore, it is important to change your username to something less common.
You can use WHOIS to check to keep track of your registrar details for your domain. Hackers can reverse engineer email addresses then use the forgotten password feature on the domain registrar to take control of a domain. They then hold your domain at ransom and will not be released until the demands have been met.
If you are a customer of our cPanel shared hosting accounts, you may not know the resources are shared with multiple customers across the servers. To ensure one website is not using all the server's resources and affecting the performance of all the other websites, there are limitations in place. These limitations are decided by a maximum number of resources that can be used for CPU, RAM, I/O, inodes ad entry Processes by a particular hosting account.
Shared hosting is not a bad thing. As it is more cost-effective, this allows the cost of the server to be divided across multiple users without the requirements of purchasing an entire server for your website. 2025.hosting-australia.com/ providers support all services under the shared hosting services. There is no requirement to have extensive server knowledge to maintain the hosting. This is helped by the built-in control panel (cPanel) which enables you to smoothly manage your hosting. This is also where you may notice your cPanel resources, these are important as you want to make sure your hosting is staying within your hosting package requirements. As exceeded, these will create an issue with your services. I.E: Emails and website traffic.
Disk Usage is the total amount of storage space found for your hosting. These are taken-up files found in your File Manager. These files can include Website files, Email data, Databases, Backups.
Bandwidth is used to monitor the measured amount of data that can be transferred from users to your hosting. The bandwidth is dependent on the amount of traffic that visits your website or email traffic between domain accounts across users. If you find you are exceeding your bandwidth usage, you may be receiving more traffic to your site. You may also check your monthly bandwidth transfer within your cPanel. This allows you to monitor during what periods and the causes of the bandwidth spike.
CPU represents the number of central processing units (CPUs or cores) available to your account. For example, the Core Hosting package has 1 CPU allocated to the hosting. The ultimate hosting package has 3 CPUs allocated. If your site uses a database, is receiving a large amount of traffic, relies on scripts (such as PHP), or uses many resource-intensive add-on-on these and plugins, having an increased CPU size will enhance your site's performance.
Physical memory limit corresponds to the amount of memory used by end users’ processes. The cause of high physical memory can be due to, increased number of visitors, a high number of entry processes, updates to your website, presence of malware, new theme plugins recently installed. If you are running into a high physical memory issue, try optimizing your website by adding caching, scaling images, minimizing scripts and CSS.
I/O is the speed of data transfer between the HDD/SSD and the RAM. For example, a user visits your website and is required to download a large file. Depending on the I/O usage will determine the processing speed of the download.
The number of inodes on an account is countered by File Usage. Inodes, however, are not the same as files. They are pieces of data used by Linux-based systems to reference files and directories.
MYSQL is an open-source relational database management system. What does this mean? This allows the database to create, read, update, delete, all your website files. Depending on you are the size of the content of your website will determine the size of your MYSQL database usage.
At some point, we have all received a bounce-back message, and reading the bounce-back message you may not be able to work out if the issue is with your email/domain or the recipients. You should always contact our support if you are having difficulties with your emails, and our support staff will help your email be delivered.
There are tools you can use even before contacting support. these tools will help you figure out if the issue lies within your hosting or the recipients.
Before we get into the best tools for testing deliverability, it's important to understand the difference between Deliverability and Delivery.
Email Delivery is in relation to if a recipient’s server has accepted your email or not. If it did, it's still not certain where a message ended up, but it already counts as a positive result. If a message bounces for any reason (misspelled email address, the domain does not exist, etc.), it counts as a failed delivery, and you are immediately notified of it with a bounce message with have grown to love.
Email Deliverability refers to if an email was delivered to the recipient’s inbox or straight to their spam folder. In that case, deliverability is often referred to as Inbox Placement. There can be multiple factors such as a sender’s reputation, authentications, or quality of content when automatic filters decide when the email is attempting to be delivered.
Now that you understand the difference between Deliverability and Delivery, let us look at four main tools to test your emails deliverability. All you need to access these tools are your browser, there are no installations required.
Mail-tester.com is a free tool for analyzing specific emails and their content. It is extremely simple, you will just be required to send an email to the address found in the middle of the screen, using your email. Once you have sent the email, wait a few seconds then simply click the “Then Check Your Score” button. Mail-tester investigates various factors that affect deliverability.
It checks the likelihood of it going to spam and gives tips on what to improve. It also takes into factor your domain and the authentication methods used with improvements or any blacklists that may be an issue.
Spamcheck is easy to use, you just paste your email’s HTML code into the dialog box, along with all the headers. Then you will get back a score in just seconds, unlike Mail-tester the lower the score the better. You will also find displayed how to improve the email.
Postmark also allows you to integrate Spamcheck into your mail client and automatically run spam checks on all outgoing emails.
GlockApps emulates email sending through Postfix and two other platforms. It then estimates where your email would land using these services. GlockApps allows you to send test three emails for free. After that you will be required to sign up for a monthly or annual subscription plan, there are different levels of costing and services depending on your requirements.
GlockApps delivers a full detailed report to help you troubleshoot your emails. GlockApps also offers automatic testing, DMARC Analytics, Uptime Monitoring, and Diagnostics all accessible via the user dashboard.
Authentications play a significant role in email deliverability. MX Toolbox offers various tools aimed at helping improve the domains’ capabilities. One of them is aimed strictly at validating a domain’s authentication methods.
All that is required is sending a test email to ping@tools.mxtoolbox.com. Unlike the other sites previously mentioned, you will receive an email back to your account with a link to your report.
MX Toolbox also offers the ability to test your domain name and records corresponding with the domain.
The following commands allow you to troubleshoot certain records.
| blacklist: | Check IP or host for reputation | |
| smtp: | Test mail server SMTP (port 25) | |
| mx: | DNS MX records for domain | |
| a: | DNS A record IP address for host name | |
| spf: | Check SPF records on a domain | |
| txt: | Check TXT records on a domain | |
| ptr: | DNS PTR record for host name | |
| cname: | DNS canonical host name to IP address | |
| whois: | Get domain registration information | |
| arin: | Get IP address block information | |
| soa: | Get Start of Authority record for a domain | |
| tcp: | Verify an IP Address allows tcp connections | |
| http: | Verify a URL allows http connections | |
| https: | Verify a URL allows secure http connections | |
| ping: | Perform a standard ICMP ping | |
| trace: | Perform a standard ICMP trace route | |
| dns: | Check your DNS Servers for possible problems |
Making sure all your email is delivered 24/7 is our top priority, we also understand that there are some issues from time to time. Therefore these email troubleshooting tools are such an important factor in having an email account.
Business and customers data is one of the most important assets of a company. When hackers and malware sneak in, this data can be compromised, resulting in data breaches and disruption of business operations.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of businesses have realized they are just as effective if not more since moving their operation to an online workspace and working remotely. This has been shown that employees have been more productive since the change to working from home.
But with the change, this also brings issues. In your workplace, IT professionals were able to monitor and keep the security up to date. Most employees or business owners are required to do this themselves from work home.
With the threat of cyber-attacks becoming more common since this change. Here at 2025.hosting-australia.com/, we want to make sure you prevent any malicious attacks and stay up to date with security by installing one of these chosen Malware Removal Programs
Malwarebytes is personally my go-to choice when it comes to malware programs. Malwarebytes is accessible on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS so you can keep all your devices risk-free. With the use of anti-spyware, anti-malware, and anti-rootkit technology that helps shield you from threats by removing viruses in real-time.
Malwarebytes also has four layers of defense that wrap browser and software programs, preventing them from being taken over by infectious attacks.
Avast is simple and does not require in-depth IT and antivirus knowledge and expertise. Once it is up and running, accessing multiple devices is simple with the user interface. The dashboard centralizes access to all the devices and workstations, granting you total over the behavior and actions of the antivirus on devices.
AVG is extremely popular and known for being accessible for home users. AVG is loaded with safety features and s designed with simplicity in mind.
AVG is an excellent choice for android users through the antivirus app. It offers anti-theft features for lost or stolen phones or tablets. While protecting from the latest viruses, malware, spyware, unsafe apps, and settings, also warning users of scams or unwanted callers.
It's Tax time……. Here at 2025.hosting-australia.com/, we understand the tax man causes stress and robs you of precious time to focus on your business. Sifting through all your purchases and receipts, trying to work out all your yearly expenses ready for the 1st of July. Also collecting sales tax accurately from customers can be a hassle when you have an online store. There are so many variables you need to take into consideration. So how will you get the exact tax calculation right every time? Luckily, if you use a WooCommerce store, these plugins help calculate the tax rates according to your customer's state or area and there are plenty of options there to automate sales tax calculations.
This will be automatically built into your WooCommerce plugin as WooCommerce Tax is the official extension from Automattic for automatic tax calculations. Powered by Jetpack cloud services so you can start benefitting from free security, insights, and uptime monitoring.
Once you update your tax settings, your store will collect sales tax at checkout based on the store address in your WooCommerce Settings.
WooCommerce Tax is a free service if you are selling from one location. Sadly, if you are selling from more than one you will be required to use a standalone tax plugin which will discuss further.
TaxJar’s sales tax automation makes collecting sales tax easy by removing complex configurations and providing accurate rates for WooCommerce. Once you are synced up to TaxJar, you will see your sales tax collected by city and county, across all states, and including all the channels on which you sell.
At the cart and checkout page, TaxJar takes the following input from your store.
And returns accurate sales tax (including state, country, city, and special taxes) based on the following.
TaxJar offers a free 30-day trial, that does not require a credit card when signing up. However, after the 30 days are over, there are 3 monthly subscriptions you can choose from depending on your needs.
Quaderno uses real-time sales tax rates in your selected country while following the local tax laws of your customer that are set in the Quaderno plugin – this is extremely helpful if you dealing with customers outside of Australia. Quaderno has a feature that generates automated tax receipts for each sale made from your website, these receipts are also available in multiple languages and will show different currencies according to the customers’ location.
Quaderno integrates seamlessly with your chosen eCommerce platform, shopping cart, or payment processor. The secure APIs access your sales data and begin automating your sales tax processes in seconds.
All plans include.
Unlike TaxJar, Quaderno only offers a free 7-day trial. They have plans best suited to your site's traffic and transactions per month starting from $99 a month up to 1,000 transactions per month.
