A headline so good we totally stole it.
On-demand availability has become so highly expected, that when something as popular as Spotify goes down, it only takes a minute for it to pop up on the Twitterverse.
It happened this week, when purportedly Spotify, (we’re guessing unintentionally) had an SSL certificate expire. Spotify was only down for an hour, but nearly everyone knew.
What’s an SSL certificate and why should you care?
SSL itself stands for ‘secure socket layer’. Helpful right?
By installing an SSL certificate on your website’s server, it allows you to host it over HTTPS and create secure, encrypted connections between your site and its visitors. This safeguards communication. SSL also authenticates the server.
It’s now industry standard to have an SSL certificate on your website, regardless of the type of site. If you’ve got a simple data collection form on your website, you should have an SSL.
However, because SSL certificates authenticate your site they do expire. It’s not a one-hit-wonder, think of it as your multi-factor authentication for your website. It provides surety to your users that they are interacting directly with you, and not some spoof impersonation site.
How do you avoid doing a Spotify?
This is where a service such as managed hosting comes into play. Much like the managed services for your IT infrastructure, it’s the management of your hosting platform by experts.
Most people make the mistake of thinking their website is set and forget. Unfortunately, it’s not. Think about how often your PC or Mac asks you to restart to apply updates, the same happens to your web content management system. As the technology landscape changes, operators release new patches and updates to ensure that everything has the best levels of protection.
Secured managed hosting means that your provider does this all for you.
Secured managed hosting by Colton Computers also offers:
There’s so much more to secured managed hosting, but if you’ve got a website and you haven’t touched it or opened the admin console for a while, give us a call and we can talk you through your options.
Credit where credit is due. We stole the headline from the guys at thesslstore.com – here’s their full takedown of what happened to Spotify, and even more detail on why you should care about SSL certificates.
Source: https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/the-day-the-music-died-certificate-expiration-takes-down-spotify/
