No, we’re not talking about chocolate chips. We’re talking about the requirement that you have to display a warning about your use of cookies to your website viewers in order to comply with data privacy requirements and laws.
You may think that once your website is up and running that you can just leave it there for years. Nothing can happen to it, right? Who would want to mess with it anyway?
Unfortunately, within days of launching your website the malicious bots will be at work, trying to find vulnerabilities so that they can take advantage of your site to spread their own malware, increase search engine results for themselves, inject code into servers, send malicious emails and more.
The first thing that I do when considering doing business with someone is look at their website. How about you?
That first glance usually tells me everything that I need to know in more ways than one. If I come away with a negative impression I probably won’t go there.
As a business owner, you must look at your website from your customer’s eyes. This is very often and first (and possibly the last) impression that people have of you and your operation. You need to do everything in your power to grab them before they run in the other direction.
If you have a WordPress site, you will eventually get hit with spam in the form of fake users registering, spam comments, spam coming through your contact form, and spam forum posts.
To get all of this under control, I highly recommend adding a plug-in called CleanTalk to your site. Every other plug-in that I tried let some spam squeak by, and some plug-ins actually prevented the site from operating properly. Not this one. It takes just a few minutes to set up and configure. After that you’ll have to figure out what to do with your extra time now that you aren’t moderating tons of spam comments and deleting fake users.
Get it here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/cleantalk-spam-protect/
First, a brief explanation of what web hosting is for those who would rather not pay attention to such things. When you want to start a website you need to do a few things, like choose a catchy domain name, decide what you want your website to look like and what you want it to say, who is going to design it for you, and lastly, where you are going to ‘host’ your site. You can’t just leave your great web design on your designer’s computer – it has to go somewhere so that other people can see it.
That’s where web hosting comes in. There are as many choices as there are differing opinions on which company you should go with, how much it should cost, and what kinds of options you need. It’s a little overwhelming, even for those of us who do it all the time. You can get away with spending just a few dollars a month, all the way up to several hundred. The choice should be solidly based on how secure your site needs to be, how much traffic you expect, how complicated your content is, and whether you need features like email accounts thrown in. This article is my feeble attempt to help you sort through the mess and make a decision that is right for your business and your website.