PP 131: 3 Critical Tech Considerations for Online Entrepreneurs

Today, I am going to share with you 3 critical tech considerations for online entrepreneurs.

You know I am very transparent in everything that I share with you on the Positive Productivity podcast. So I want you to know that this episode was inspired by something I experienced just this week.

Actually, yesterday, when I went to post my episode, my site would not let me in. So I contacted my hosting provider, and I promptly found out that one of my websites, if not all, had been hacked. My hosting had shut me down.

And before I could get my site’s back up, I needed to have the malware removed. As if this wasn’t difficult enough already, the malware that the hackers had put on my site had deleted all of my website files except for one site. So that’s where today’s episode gets started.

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression when life gives you lemons make lemonade. So here I am sharing my lemonade with you all.

3 Critical Tech Considerations for Online Entrepreneurs – #1

The first critical tech consideration for you is to store all of your doctor In cloud storage,

I have had tech disasters impact my PC as well as my Mac, so I know firsthand just how important this is.

For example, last year, one of my cats dumped a cup of water onto my brand new MacBook. Thankfully, I had been storing all the documents I created into iCloud, so I was able to access all of those files from my PC even while my MacBook was being repaired.

After that happened, I made sure to put all documents that were stored on my PC into Dropbox, so that if anything ever like that happened again, I would have access to all my files anywhere. There’s a lot that can happen in all of our lives. It can impact where we work, when we work and from what device. So I strongly encourage you, if you’re not already doing it to make sure that each and every document that you have on your computer is backed up in the cloud.

3 Critical Tech Considerations for Online Entrepreneurs – #2

The second critical tech consideration for you is to make sure that your website is backed up.

I am embarrassed to admit that even though I build out websites for clients all the time, and do consider their backups, I had never considered my own. So when I found out that the malware had deleted all of my websites, and yes, plural, websites, files, I panicked. Thankfully, my hosting company had two backups. The first was from yesterday morning, it’s likely that that backup will was already infected. However, it was a lot more recent than the second backup they still had on file which was from more than six months ago.

Although you may question my reasoning, and I will get to that in just a moment, I did ask my hosting provider to restore yesterday’s backup because it has so much more content that I really don’t want to have to put back up on the site, one piece at a time.

Again, I’ll get to more behind that reasoning in just a moment.

All the resources that I am about to mention you will be able to find on my website at https://thekimsutton.com/pp131.

Now, if you are listening to this episode right after it’s been released, the site may not be quite up yet and I will get to that in just a moment.

There are so many great backup tools out there. And I’m going to specifically focus on those that are meant for WordPress users because honestly, I don’t have experience with any other platform besides WordPress. If you consult with Dr. Google however, and you’re on another type of website build, I am sure you can find recommendations for other types of websites.

I have personally used WP All-In-One Migration to move websites from one hosting service to another, and one of the features of that tool is that you can create backups. Don’t ask me why I never thought to do it for myself, however, it is now in my calendar to perform backups twice a week.

This is a free plugin that you can find by going into the plugins section of your website and simply typing WP All-In-One Migration into the search box.

While I was preparing for this episode, however, I did poll my community and I received recommendations as well for Backup Buddy and WP Engine.

As I have already mentioned, though, my hosting provider did have two backups in their files so I was able to use one of those. Whatever you do today, however, if you don’t already have a backup system in place, please please please perform a backup of your website today.

3 Critical Tech Considerations for Online Entrepreneurs – #3

The third critical tech consideration for online entrepreneurs is website security.

You may be wondering why you need this if you are already getting backups of your site, but the reason why website security is so important is because your site visitors go to your site for your content, not for whatever malware and whatever else hackers can possibly put onto your site without you even knowing.

I know I want my visitors to come to my site and get inspiration and motivation and encouraging thoughts to push them forward and help them uplevel their personal and professional lives. The last thing I want to do is take down their computer or even their websites by viewing my content.

I mentioned them in the backup section, however WP Engine is a hosting provider that does include security in their hosting services. If you’re not ready to move hosting providers, though, I also recommend IThemes Security or WordFence.

IThemes Security I have personally used in the past and ashamedly had actually just removed from my primary site. Again, don’t ask me why. I don’t have a good explanation. This is also a free plugin which does offer up upgraded versions for sale. But you can find it by again, going to your plugins section on your WordPress site and searching for IThemes Security in the search bar.

Going back to the explanation I had promised regarding my sites, in order to get my hosting restored with my hosting platform, I needed to outsource a company to remove the malware from my sites. The removal of this malware was the only way that I would possibly be able to get my hosting restored. And actually, it wasn’t until I found SiteLock, which is the company that I’m using that I discovered that actually all of my files had been deleted.

Sitelock has been an incredible company to work with so far. And in fact, in my initial conversation with a tech support, I ended up getting into a long conversation about podcasts with the gentlemen. They’ve kept me in the loop every step of the way. And in fact disclosure as of the time of this recording, they are not an affiliate, however, I will be including a link to their website in the resources.

I now have a contract with a Sitelock for the next 12 months in which they will be both monitoring and protecting my website from malicious hacks such as the one that I just experienced. I feel so much better moving forward knowing that site visitors aren’t going to be getting malware from my site.

Unfortunately, Sitelock does not perform backups so that is something that I’m going to have to handle on my own.

As I mentioned before, I have used WP All-in-one migration, so I would expect that as soon as my sites are up, that I will be creating that backup immediately.

If you have any questions about any of these resources, or again if you want to get the names to any of them, please visit my site at https://thekimsutton.com/pp131.

With that said, go forth and have a positive and productive day.