Is your site secure?

A few years ago Google started favouring sites with secure certificates (SSL). For those of you who don’t know, an SSL (Secure Sockets layer) puts HTTPS in front of a website address, rather than the standard HTTP.

It’s fairly common knowledge that any site that asks you to input sensitive data (address or credit card details for example) should run on HTTPS otherwise there is a greater risk of the data you entered being hijacked.

Google started putting more weight behind these sites and favouring them with higher rankings in their search listings over non secure sites because they want safer and better quality sites to be more prominent as part of their results.

In July, Google Chrome browsers will begin flagging every website that does not use HTTPS encryption. Any website that contains input fields, asks for passwords or any other sensitive data, or is visited in incognito mode, will be marked as ‘not secure’ if it does not have an SSL Certificate. This will be prominently highlighted in the address bar. With the majority of internet browsing across desktop and mobile devices now carried out on Google’s Chrome browser, this means that any site not running on a secure certificate will be deemed unsafe and consequently fewer people will be willing to visit.

So this is really just a friendly bit of consumer advice from the friendly Datapartners team. If you don’t already have an SSL Certificate, speak to your hosting company and get one. If you are a Datapartners customer already, you will already have been made aware of this. The choice is yours but you’d be damaging your web presence if you don’t get one.

Nominet price increase and CRAM-MD5 support

OK so this is more of a public service announcement rather than a blog. We sent some of our customers an email recently, informing them that Nominet (the official registry of UK domain names) is increasing the wholesale cost of UK domain names by 50% this year and we, in turn, have been hit with more like a 100% increase from our upstream provider. Unfortunately, we've had to increase our prices as a result but we've managed to keep it as low as possible. To be fair, it's the first time Nominet has increased its prices for UK domains since 1999 so we can't complain really. Well, we can and I'm sure some of our customers will too, but that's just life unfortunately.

Also, some of our customers were contacted recently about changes being made to older mailboxes. This will affect many other people as well so, being the nice people we are at Datapartners, thought we'd share our knowledge on this matter too.

Basically, something called CRAM-MD5 support (yeah I don't know either) is being switched off on 22nd February 2016 in line with industry security requirements. Therefore, anyone using this must update their email clients (Outlook, Windows Mail etc) to use secure sockets in order to improve email security and to continue using mail after February.

As complicated as it may sound, the necessary changes are simple to make on your computers, phones and tablets and we have found some great step by step instruction videos on how to do this:

For Android devices
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY0ejyXpN_0

For iPhones / iPads
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN7PNk2xs10

Professional:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5bQJ-ZFpJo

For Windows 10:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWffeFTPmJA

For Apple Mac:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0ISihtgsMQ

We suggest watching the relevant video through first and only make changes to the settings if required because it may not affect you at all. Of course if you only access your email using online webmail then you're fine anyway.

https://help.fasthosts.co.uk/app/answers/detail/a_id/2745

You're welcome :-)