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While we certainly don’t want to embarrass one of our customers, we must admit that one of the sites on one of our servers (which we won’t mention!) was hacked the other day. How did this happen at Hosting 123? Why did we do such a poor job to allow this?

Well, while we certainly are not proud of the fact that this happened on one of our lovely untainted servers, it must be said that a weak password makes all the difference in the world. Unbeknownst to us, the password for the admin was set to “admin1234” and as the botnets are busily working around the clock to try passwords endlessly, it was only a matter of time before this one was cracked out. Fortunately, as we take daily incremental backups, restoring the site to its original version was a piece of cake. Of course, we did go ahead and change that password, so no use in trying it again Chinese hackers.

As a result of this kerfuffle, we rolled out an additional security policy to deal with these pesty botnets, which blocks IPs that perform too many password attempts on any wordpress sites hosted by us. By the way, this hack didn’t result in any loss of secure data, but it did result in turning a pretty corporate site into a portal for pornography! So definitely a case to be careful about your passwords for anything and everything on the web unless of course you like those kinds of sites.

Many people ask us, “Why choose Hosting 123 compared to some of the larger competitors?”

While it is true that we have a small staff of less than dozen people, we will not be running your sites out of our basement garage. We leverage the global power of Amazon servers that have an unbeaten track record at performing amazing speeds and uptime, while at the same time providing you with our very own high quality customer service that a small operation such as ours can deliver. Our management isn’t flying high in the sky with little understanding of day-to-day operations. We all are highly involved with the hosting services provided, and ensure the customer is always our first priority. Essentially, we leverage the power of the massive while providing the level of support you’d expect from your local hardware store.

Some do question though, “Why not just use Amazon directly for our hosting needs?”

For some businesses, this is actually the more logical approach. If you have an IT department that knows how to run web, mail and file servers; knows how to fix network problems and maintain backups and keep your data secure then we agree you’re better off using Amazon directly. However, Amazon itself provides no support for its infrastructure, so unless you have your own team of experts it is nearly impossible to maintain your own server without the risk of a lot of downtime and loss of data. Even worse, without proper security and experts watching the system, you can risk having all your data stolen.

In the end, the answer is in the name. We make hosting simple for you, as easy as 1 2 3. If you want to have your site up and running in hours and secure in the knowledge that it will be online, available and backed by powerful servers with a team of knowledgeable experts ready to answer your queries then look no further than Hosting 123.

Its that time again. Hosting 123 has dropped prices once again!

For Basic Hosting we’ve dropped our price from $20 to $13 per month; for Business Hosting we’ve dropped from our original price of $40 to just $25 per month; and for premium hosting we’ve gone from $110 to $100 per month.

How can we do this? Well most people love the Sun, but we have to say its the Cloud that rains down these advantages to us. As all of our infrastructure is working and operating in the Cloud, when the prices of cloud computing go down, we pass those prices on to our valued customers. Combining the cloud with our technical know-how and grouping features, we actually provide lower costs to you, the end user, than amazon itself!

As is indicated in the previous article, Amazon continues to be the leader in the cloud, and they’re the only one with with data centres right here in Australia and around the world, so we’re very glad and proud to be partners with them.

Just remember, whether you’re big or small, we’re here to help you make it as easy as 1 2 3.

We thought it was about time for an upgrade, so we’ve completely redone the design of our hosting site here, which now features this blog as well as a more thorough explanation of what we do and what services we offer here at Hosting 123. Don’t expect to see many blog posts, as we’re still quite busy working away on our development projects over at The Ironing Board, but we hope to keep you informed of the latest and greatest from Hosting 123 right here.