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Hi everyone, this week I’d like to quickly go over mail storage, what it means and how to keep on top of it.

So a lot of people have trouble keeping on top of their mailboxes. This can either be because they don’t have the correct configuration in their mail setup or because they don’t check their storage regularly enough. 

With the incorrect configurations, a POP3 email setup can run into storage issues quite regularly, if you don’t have your emails set up to delete anything on the server once it has been downloaded to your local device then it can quickly fill up and cause issues with your emails ability to send and receive. One way of working around this is to log in to webmail and clear it out manually.

To do this go to a browser and enter into the address bar - webmail.yourdomain.com - For example if your domain was bertha.com, you would enter webmail.bertha.com. Once done that should take you to a login screen, from there you will enter your email address and the associated password. Once logged in, select a default application, I’d personally recommend roundcube. Then select any emails you want to delete and do so. You can delete in bulk by clicking on the storage icon located in the top left corner of your webmail. It should say something like 7MB/10MB. You can use the ensuing screen to delete emails in bulk.

Alternatively you can set your emails up to delete automatically once they are downloaded from the server. For outlook, you may do this by opening your account settings, selecting ‘More Settings’, then navigate to ‘Advanced’. Under the ‘Delivery’ heading, there should be 3 settings. I’d recommend setting them the same as mine on the left.

IMAP users can also have issues with storage, although it can be a bit easier to manage accidentally. An IMAP set up is when your local emails on your PC or phone are synced with the server. So any deleted on your PC/phone will be deleted from the server and vice versa. This however means that while you can keep your online storage clear from outlook manually. You will eventually run out of space if you hang onto a lot of old emails. To prevent filling up your mailbox this way I recommend setting up and auto archive for your mail client. The following link leads to our user guide for setting this up yourself.

https://clients.hosting-australia.com/knowledgebase/149/-Email-Archiving---Automatic-Outlook-.html

If you have any trouble with setting this one up, we can actually help you with it, just give us a ring on (07) 4914 2433 and ask us about email archiving. 

There you go, a brief rundown of mail storage and how to easily circumnavigate a full mailbox before it happens. If you have any other questions about this out friendly support team are always available and willing to help.

If you had any trouble with any of the terms in this article go check out our glossary here. 

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A lot of people have a lot riding on their emails, you’re probably not different. You can run an entire business solely through emails, if you’re doing this and your emails become inaccessible or unavailable over an extended period of time you could be in a spot of trouble. Here are some steps you can take to ensure your emails are consistent and reliable.

The first may seem like the most obvious, but it is one of the most important and that is your password. It needs to be complex enough so that someone won’t easily guess it and you really need to make sure it isn’t on this list. A mixture of numbers, letters (capital and lowercase) and symbols is recommended to provide the most secure password. If you know you have trouble remembering passwords, then you need to be sure it’s written down securely somewhere. You also need to be absolutely certain that all of your devices with active email accounts have the most current password so as to avoid any issues with our server firewalls.

Another thing you need to be aware of is your mailbox’s storage capacity. As soon as your mailbox is full it will start bouncing incoming emails and blocking any outgoing emails as well. Meaning you won’t receive or be able to send. Anything you do receive while your mailbox is full cannot be recovered either and will need to be resent. You can manage your mailbox storage from the following address -yourdomain/webmail-. From there you can login using your email address and password, in the top right you should see something like x/100mb. Click on that to manage your storage.

The last thing is in regard to deliverability, so you shouldn’t have any trouble sending emails to anyone and will also help you keep out spam at the same time. Mail authentication, AKA DKIM, DMARC and SPF records inserted into your domains DNS. SPF looks at any of your incoming mail and verifies it is coming from a legitimate source. If it cannot verify the source, it will reject the mail before it ever enters your mailbox. DKIM is for outgoing, when you send an email a DKIM signature is attached to it, this tells any receiving mail server that your email is legitimate and is safe to allow through to be delivered. DMARC basically just ensures that SPF and DKIM records are being properly authenticated and that any fraudulent emails are blocked. Once all three are installed your emails will almost always successfully deliver and incoming spam will be filtered out effectively. You can check if your domain has SPF, DKIM and DMARC here

If you stick to these three rules you will 100% notice the difference than if you were acting otherwise. If you have any questions about your emails please don’t be afraid to call ((07) 4914 2433) or email us (support@hosting-australia.com).

If you had any trouble understanding any of the terms in this article please check out our glossary.

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Hi everyone, this week I’d like to clarify what the bandwidth allowance on hosting packages is. Most of Hosting Australia’s hosting package has infinite bandwidth allowances, with a few exceptions. This means that you pretty much don’t have to worry about exceeding this limit at all. Before we get into that we’ll quickly go over counts as bandwidth usage.  We do enforce a high end limit, to prevent malicious use of Bandwidth, but this should not effect legitimate use of bandwidth on your site.

The first and most well-known way of using up your bandwidth is http traffic. Simply put this is people visiting and using your website, the more visitors you have the more bandwidth you will use up. One of the more common reasons we see our clients use up their bandwidth occurs when a special event or sale is held on their website and they receive more visitors to their site than usual. Obviously, it could be disastrous for a site to go down right in the middle of a big sale, so what we recommend to anyone before holding an event like this would be to contact us and discuss further.

One way of using up bandwidth that is less widely known Is through outgoing mail, Pop3 and IMAP traffic can quickly exceed your bandwidth limits if you’re not careful sending out lots of emails. Compromised email accounts can also be your worst enemy here as even one account sending out spam can max your bandwidth before you can blink. The easiest way to avoid this is to update your password regularly and to follow the general rules to creating secure passwords.

The last one is FTP, AKA File Transfer Protocol. FTP is a service for transferring data and files across the internet, you may upload and download whatever you want using certain applications and software. However once again if you’re not careful of the size or the amount of content you’re uploading you could be maxing your bandwidth again. If you know you’re going to doing a large FTP transfer that could put you in the red for your bandwidth give us a heads up and we can increase your limit temporarily.

Bandwidth is easy to manage if you know what not to do, it’s rare to max it out but if you do happen to reach the ceiling limit at a bad time then you could find yourself without website and emails in times of need.

If you had any trouble with any of the terms in this article you can visit Hosting-Australia’sglossary of terms.

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[et_pb_section fb_built="1" _builder_version="3.22"][et_pb_row _builder_version="3.25" background_size="initial" background_position="top_left" background_repeat="repeat"][et_pb_column type="4_4" _builder_version="3.25" custom_padding="|||" custom_padding__hover="|||"][et_pb_text _builder_version="3.27.4" background_size="initial" background_position="top_left" background_repeat="repeat"]While looking a bit daunting, code is really not that difficult of a language to learn as you may think, starting with the basics may seem obvious but they are often really simple and doing so is the first step to mastering any computer language.

In this day and age there are seemingly infinite free online sources available should you be interested in learning how to code. It has never been easier to pick up than it is now.

One place I recommend is a site called w3schools.com.

It has tonnes of tutorials, guides, quizzes and walkthroughs for all the major styles of code and can quickly assist you in becoming well versed in the fine arts of HTML or JavaScript and many other written languages. Did I mention it was free?

There are also plenty of useful YouTube channels if you’re struggling a bit to teach yourself, Khan Academy has a few channels with endless amounts of informative and detailed videos from the basic level to much more advanced techniques and skills. Their computing channel specific to computer science and code is where you’d find what you’re looking for but their main channel, Khan Academy, covers way more than just that, math, science and economics to name a few things.

If you’re looking for a more engaging style of learning though, codecombat.com is actually a fantasy style RPG game that helps teach code, it’s definitely a more fun way of learning and I’m not going to lie. I spent probably a bit too long playing while testing it out.

In summary, code is all around you and more accessible than ever before. Once you get into it and can begin to let your creative juices flow it’s can be quite fun and fulfilling too, although at times frustrating but we don’t talk about that.
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Here at Hosting Australia our developers have noticed a concerning trend.

We are seeing more and more incidences of WordPress websites being hacked or compromised in someway.

Unfortunately, we are seeing one common theme. Inevitably, access to website has been made possible through the lack of security implemented by iether the website's developer or owner.

Listed in this article are 5 of the top ways reasons your website is vulnerable. 

1. Not updating WordPress

If there’s one commonality among WordPress hack victims, it’s this:

Not updating WordPress!

According to Sucuri’s Hacked Website Report, somewhere between 55-61% of WordPress hack victims were running out-of-date WordPress when they got infected, and that’s definitely not a coincidence:

(Charts by Visualizer Lite.)

From reflection on the sites that we see being compromised we see 3 times of people who don't update their WordPress installs.

1. People who put off updates because they’re too busy or forget, OR
2. People who are afraid that updating their site will break it, OR
3. People who have no idea that their website needs updates or how to do it.

If you belong in group 1, then stop procrastinating already! – it just takes a few seconds to update your site.

If you belong in the group 2, you can take some steps to ensure nothing breaks your site.

Always make a full and complete backup of your site before you run an update.

In the unlikely event that your site does crash, you can easily roll back the previous version.

If you are in group 3? Then we are here to help! Open a support ticket by emailing support@hosting-australia.com or contact your developer and ask about updating your site.

2. Not updating plugins

See this as the same as updating your WordPress install.  It is just as important, if not more so, to update the plugins that you use in your site.

If you use outdated plugins and do not update them, you are exposing yourself to potential security issues and bugs…

Again, Sucuri’s study has some helpful data – 18% of WordPress hack victims were hacked just because they hadn’t updated plugins with known vulnerabilities. The plugin developer knew there was a problem and fixed it – people just didn’t update the plugin to secure their site!

Additionally, in a survey of WordPress hack victims from Wordfence, over 55% of people who knew how the hacker got in said it was because of a plugin issue.

If you’ve got a ton of plugins and you find it hard to keep track of all the updates, we recommend using Wordfence.

This plugin comes with a malware scanner that will check your other plugins for malware, bad URLs, backdoors, SEO spam, malicious redirects and code injections. It also draws your attention to potential security issues when a plugin you’re using has been closed or abandoned.

3. Not protecting your WordPress admin directory

In that same Wordfence survey, one of the most common WordPress hack attempts involved getting access to your WordPress login credentials, either through brute force attacks or password theft:

To prevent that from happening, you’ll want to protect your WordPress admin directory (your /wp-admin page).

First and foremost, make sure you password protect your WordPress admin page.

By default, you’ll require a password to get into the directory, but we’re talking about adding another layer on top of that.

That way, anyone trying to access your WordPress admin will need to provide an extra username and password.

If you need a walkthrough on how to do this, check out Step 2 of our article: 4 Ways to Tighten WordPress Security.

If you don’t like that approach, another good alternative is two-factor authentication.

With two-factor authentication set up, your site users won’t just require a password to log in – they’ll also need to input a code that’s sent to them via text message, email, or an app.

To do this, check out our WordPress two-factor authentication guide.

Last but not least, it’s not a good idea to use “admin” as your WordPress username.

Hackers might attempt to get into your site using this default username, so you should definitely switch it up.

While WordPress doesn’t let you directly change your username, you can still do it by following these methods.

4. Using weak passwords

This one’s pretty obvious – if you use weak passwords, it’s easier for hackers to access your accounts.

We’re not just talking about the password that you use for your WordPress admin account, though.

The same thing applies to your other passwords, including your:

• Web hosting accounts
• FTP accounts
• MySQL database
• Email accounts associated with your WordPress admin account

To learn more about generating a strong password, read How Secure Is My Password? Here’s Your Answer, Plus How to Pick a Strong Password.

Additionally, some hosts (like Kinsta and WP Engine) let you use two-factor authentication for your hosting account. That’s another good layer of security.

5. Using low quality themes

If you do a quick Google search, you’ll find a good handful of websites that distribute paid WordPress themes for free.

At first glance, this might look like a cool money-saver for website owners on a tight budget.

In actuality, though, most of these sites are pretty dodgy…

If you download and install a theme from them, you might end up compromising the security of your website.

Remember, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

If you want to use a premium theme on your website, then get it from a reputable theme developer website and PAY for it. Or you can check out our free WordPress themes (no hacks here – promise!).

Stop WordPress hack attempts before it’s too late

Sad to say, the average WordPress site owner doesn’t consider security a priority.

When you’re setting up your site for the first time, you’re probably more concerned with the look and feel of your website than anything else.

And once you get your site up and running, you’ll turn your focus to churning out great content, neglecting security as you go along.

Obviously, this is a huge mistake.

You don’t wait to wait for a WordPress hack attempt BEFORE you start caring about your site’s security – when that happens, it’ll be too late.

So set aside an hour or two and make sure that your WordPress site is secure and up-to-date.

Forget analyzing your traffic from Google Analytics or optimizing your pages for SEO — this is the one most important thing you can do for your WordPress site.

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