When running a business with an online presence emails to clients is a daily job. Ensuring that your emails are arriving in their inbox instead of being filtered to junk/spam folders is critical. If you are marketing via email to get the word out on your latest offers and promotions, even the best offer will not help if no-one reads the email, this is why Email Authentication is vital.
Making sure that your domain is correctly set up with Email Authentication is so important. These are big factors in email delivery rates and are used by all large email providers including Gmail, Outlook and ourselves. They determine whether an email is sent from a genuine source or if it may be a malicious spoofed email.
We’ve tried to make this process as simple as possible with our new tool so it doesn’t matter if you know what SPF, DKIM and DMARC are. Using the tool is as simple as sending an email from your email account, it will tell you if these are set up correctly on your domain. If not will link you to a guide on how to set these up.
You can resolve these problems in a few minutes and with these set up your emails will be much more likely to be effective. If you need any further assistance with this or have other hosting requirements just get in touch.
Once you’ve had your SSL certificate installed and have verified it’s working by manually going to https:// on your domain you now need to configure your website to force any connections to load over HTTPS.
In WordPress you can do this simply by going to the admin interface > Settings > General. Here you will see two settings we need to change “WordPress Address (URL)” and “Site Address (URL)”. By default they will start with http://, you need to change these to https://.
The importance of using HTTPS for websites is growing daily, with Google pushing this forward with changes to their Chrome browser meaning that sites not using SSL as standard will show a warning in the address bar to visitors. These warnings may end up pushing users away from your website if they lose confidence in it’s security, with the constant stream of media attention related to phishing scams, user details being hacked, etc. it’s a real concern for webmasters that shouldn’t be ignored. You can read further on these changes being made by Google this year here: https://security.googleblog.com/2016/09/moving-towards-more-secure-web.html
Not only this but Google confirmed back in a post from 2014 that “we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal” so it will also affect your search engine rankings and SEO efforts by not securing your site, the full article is available here: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.htmlRead More »
Over the past decade the number of online accounts being compromised has skyrocketed, from email accounts to social media accounts being targeted, with the average person having over 50 online account logins. The hackers are gaining access to these with methods ranging from brute force attacks on weak passwords to large data breaches against online businesses. This is why it’s recommended that you have different passwords for each website that you use.
In October 2013, 153 million adobe account details were leaked in a large data breach where the passwords were weakly encrypted and many of these were quickly converted back into plain text. With a breach like this hackers could look up your email address in this database leak and find your password in it’s encrypted form, then attempt to convert it back so they can read the password clearly. They could try this login and password on other websites, if you had used the same logins elsewhere then they could have gained access to a range of different websites, perhaps even your email accounts which could be used to reset passwords even for websites they could not gain access to. Read More »
We’re pleased to announce that we are one of the first domain registrars to be able to offer ID protection on .uk domains, including .UK, .CO.UK, .ORG.UK and more. Our privacy service will secure your personal details, hiding your name and address from the public WHOIS database, you can check your current domain WHOIS info here: http://www.nominet.uk/whois/
When you register a domain your contact details are searchable via the public WHOIS system. We still offer our existing domain privacy service for .com and other domains, but this service was not previously available to .UK Domains due to Nominet’s regulations. Recently Nominet have changed their policy to allow for a different type of service where your contact details are hidden from public searches but are still visible to Nominet for verification and we are happy to offer this service now for .UK domains. Read More »
Are you finding that you’ve started to use one password for multiple websites/programs to login? Well stop!
You should always use a different password with every website/application regardless of how strong your password is. As we’ve seen in the past that many big well known website have been compromised including Gmail, Amazon and Playstation Network. The passwords have been released into the public, these are usually encrypted but it’s only a matter of time before they are cracked, even when protected with unique salt and hashing it’s not impossible given enough time. It’s very bad practice if you use the same password on multiple sites as these could then be used to hack into your other accounts. Read More »
