To best address your needs, Bluehost provides various SSL certificates featuring different levels of protection. Protect your visitors and give them confidence that your website is secure. Learn more about Bluehost’s SSL certificate options by visiting the “Upgrades” tab in your Bluehost control panel.

Here at Bluehost, we are dedicated to providing our customers with the best, most powerful tools available. To that end, we’ve recently teamed up with CloudFlare to help you enhance your website’s speed and security. And the best part? You can enable CloudFlare for FREE with every Bluehost account!

CloudFlare is an advanced content delivery network (CDN) that provides optimal performance and security to your website. With over 14 data centers around the world, their CDN automatically caches your static website files. While dynamic content remains on your Bluehost web server, static files are physically closer to visitors. CloudFlare then uses a technology called Anycast to route your visitors to their nearest data center, helping your website load faster for visitors, regardless of where they’re located. On average, websites using CloudFlare has 65% fewer requests and uses 60% less bandwidth.

Using their intelligent global network, CloudFlare also blocks threats and limits abusive bots and crawlers from wasting bandwidth and sever sources.

We integrated CloudFlare into our Bluehost systems so that it’s easy for you to install and start using in minutes. Simply log into your Bluehost control panel (cPanel) and click on the “Upgrades” tab. From there, you can decide which CloudFlare plan is best for your site(s) and then click “Install” to get started.

CloudFlare comes in two plans: Basic and Pro. The basic CloudFlare plan is absolutely FREE and includes faster site performance, broad security protection, and basic reporting.

If you’re looking for maximum optimization, CloudFlare also offers a pro plan for $14.99, which includes real time statistic reporting, mobile optimization, advanced site security, advanced reporting, and even greater site performance improvements.

We’re excited to be working with CloudFlare to make your website, even better! If you have any questions regarding CloudFlare or how to get started, leave a comment below or call us anytime, 24/7, at 888-401-4678.

SiteLock safeguards your website by scanning for signs of trouble, checking to ensure your site is not blacklisted, verifying your site has no databases vulnerabilities, and much more. Keep hackers out. Visit the “Upgrades” tab in your Bluehost control panel to enable SiteLock security today!

The average Web user maintains 25 separate accounts but uses just 6.5 passwords to protect them, according to a landmark study (PDF) from 2007. As the Gawker breach demonstrated, such password reuse, combined with the frequent use of e-mail addresses as user names, means that once hackers have plucked login credentials from one site, they often have the means to compromise dozens of other accounts, too.

To read more about Goodin’s findings and his suggestions for good password practices, check out his full article here.

By now we all know the importance of security when it comes to a website or blog. Attacks and viruses quickly cause visitors to question the legitimacy of your site, hurting your reputation and undoing much of your hard work. Here at Bluehost, our customers often ask us how to help increase security on their WordPress websites and blogs. While there are many great tools available, one great plugin we recommend is called Wordfence.

Available in both free and premium versions, Wordfence is a full-fledged security plugin. It dates back to the TimThumb vulnerability in 2011. After author Mark Maunder had his personal blog hacked via TimThumb, he wanted to find a way to help prevent other WordPress users from suffering his same fate. Maunder teamed up with TimThumb to close the security vulnerability and to create Wordfence to improve WordPress site security overall.

Wordfence includes the following features:

• WordPress core file integrity verification and repair.
• Malware, virus, and backdoor scanning.
• Scanning for known malware URL’s in all your files, comments, pages and posts.
• A firewall that includes rate limiting, blocking fake Google crawlers, IP whitelisting and IP blocking.
• Real-time traffic that includes Google Crawlers, RSS feed readers and all other crawlers and bots. (Google Analytics does not include this data.)
• Commercial grade geolocation for your real-time traffic.
• Email alerts of warnings and critical problems.
• Brute force hacking protection.
• Active support forum and email support for paid customers.
• Many other features, such as WordPress version hiding, password strength verification, comment impersonation protection.

To keep your site running quickly, Wordfence will offload CPU and memory intensive tasks to the Wordfence cloud scanning servers, powered by Feedjit Inc. For example, rather than store large data structures in memory, Wordfence sends data in secure compressed packets to it’s scanning servers as your security scans run. This reduces your memory usage and keeps your site running fast and secure.

Click here to learn more about Wordfence and how to install it. And stay tuned for more recommendations about how to increase security on your WordPress website!

Did you know there are things you can do, related to your password, that can help ensure your information remains secure? Here are a handful of important tips:

TIP 1 – Make sure your password is secure.

• Use a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters
• Use a combination of capital and lower case letters
• Use many characters (at least 8 )
• Avoid full-length words from the dictionary
• When using words, use “made up” words or combine many into one
• Avoid familiar items (names, phone numbers, birthdays)
• Avoid common passwords and generic sequences (“password”, “admin”, “12345”)

TIP 2 – Protect your password.

• Memorize your password and do not write it down
• Do not share your password
• Do not use the same password as with other services (Gmail, Yahoo, Apple)
• Avoid using one password for all your logins
• Avoid logging in from public computers
• Change your password frequently
• Be wary of permitting browsers or applications of automatically remembering passwords

TIP 3 – Keep your email address up to date.

Our “Forgot Password” link is always available on your cPanel login page. It issues a link to the email address listed on your account that allows you to create a new password. Therefore, it’s imperative your email address be up-do-date so this link can reach you if needed. And we can manually send you this email: just open a live chat, create a ticket through helpdesk, or give us a call (888-401-4678).

TIP 4 - Memorize the last four characters of your password.

Make the last four characters of your password easy to memorize but not easily guessed. We often ask for these last four characters over the phone to verify account authorization. I’ve included the names of symbols to make speaking and choosing them easier.

At Bluehost, we take security seriously. We do everything possible to keep your information secure, but a lot still depends on you. Thankfully, following these simple tips can help keep the bad guys at bay!

Camille B.
Billing Manager