Are your Web Server ‘neighbours’ costing you sales leads?
Warning Warning Will Robinson…
Twice in recent months I’ve run into issues with my McAfee Internet Security firewall software blocking sites it says are dangerous. Don’t get me wrong – I really appreciate it because I spend a lot of time online and don’t have time or patience to be wrangling with a website Trojan or other nasty goings in the site.
McAfee throws up this message (IP blurred to protect the innocent)
Goodbye prospective clients
Now I ask you, would you buy anything from a site with this type of warning or contact them to provide services for you? I dont think so! All the fabulous SEO work or online advertising in the world is not going to convince me to go into that site – along with hundreds of other formerly prospective clients as well…
Its not actually infected
Guess what ? The worst news is that this site isn’t infected… The web host techos dutifully scanned the site and announced they ‘could not find an infection’ and bounced it back saying not our problem!
We dig deeper…
After snuffling around we discovered and pieced these facts together:
- McAfee records naughty IP addresses not the web address or URL as the ‘risky connection’.
- This website shared the IP address with 666 websites
That number is correct folks (The Devils Number) Six hundred and sixty six websites on the same IP
With bargain basement web hosting services I guess its necessary to scale up like this to recoup investment.
Its like everything; You get what you pay for. - I jumped onto a Reverse IP Tools website which listed the plethora of websites (some with URLs that I wouldnt speak out loud in mixed company…)
Any one of these sites could be the offender that McAfee had detected
The Bottom Line
Here’s the thing.
You can’t normally* control who your web hosting neighbours are, but be assured that if the neighbourhood goes down hill there’s a good chance your website will go with.
On a side note
- McAfee have chosen to not remove the blocking for this IP
The site continues to not see any prospects using McAfee (and possibly others too) - The web host wont budge – they don’t see a problem with website. All care. No responsibility
Here’s a Solution
* Sorry – I cant help myself
Succinct Ideas’ Premium Web Hosting Service is designed to specifically prevent this type of website neighbourhood style site contamination.
- We have a deliberately limited number of sites per server and IP addresses for both performance and security rationale
- We closely scrutinise and monitor all sites
- We proactively apply updates to minimum the risk of exploit hacking
- We employ an Active Firewall to kick out port scanning and brute force login attacks