Why it is important for security
Chris Booth :: Thursday 17th April 2025 :: Latest Blog Posts
Recently, we have increased our web hosting prices. Our costs have increased because data centre electrical costs have gone up and we still need to do work to watch and maintain the hosting for you all.
Earlier this year, all our websites were attacked. For a couple of weeks our websites were fending off a million hits a day. These attacks were predominantly from a range of European data centres but a lot were from the far-east.
In addition, our websites were also being harassed by search engines and AI bots who had clearly been directed to visit our websites at the same time. Many of these robots from smaller tech companies you have never heard of do not seem very well behaved and were directing tens of thousands of requests at our websites. They comprised a good portion of the traffic. It seemed clear that someone had arranged for all these robots to visit, at the same time, as part of overall attack.
What did we do? Well, in the immediate instance, we took down some websites just to stop them being compromised. Websites can't be hacked if they are not there.
Over time, we hid some of the more badly affected websites behind firewalls like CloudFlare. We also reverted changes to WordPress websites when the scoundrels actually managed to change things.
Six WordPress websites were updated with hidden links to dodgy cryptocurrency websites. One website also sprouted three subdirectories, which contained resources for Google Adverts.
None of these changes lasted very long. Yet, for this mediocre outcome, data centres all around the world consumed vast amounts of electricity attempting to batter our portfolio of websites in order to promote some crummy meme-coin scam.
In the long run, given that we have put our web hosting prices up, we decided to spend some time updating all our websites to a newer computer programme and better security software.
Almost all websites run on something called PHP. We have spent a week or so moving almost everyone to PHP8.1. Those of you who have WordPress - that sits on top of PHP too, so your websites are updated as well.
There are a handful of WordPress websites that have not made the move and we will be writing to you shortly with options.
Anyone who has a 'Contact Us' form will have had Google Recaptcha added protecting it. This is the thing that asks you to click on motorbikes or traffic lights. We have moved a lot of those over to hCaptcha as an alternative. Again, if you haven't moved, it's because you are running WordPress. We will move you soon or write to you.
Thanks for reading and if you have any questions, as always, just get in touch!