Web Hosting Box

Security is perhaps one of the most important aspects of a web hosting plan, especially for webmasters that conduct a significant volume of e-commerce on a daily basis. A single security lapse could lead to widespread data loss, site downtime, slow loading pages, and a reduction in daily traffic levels. However, one security issue that is often overlooked and underestimated is spam, which is defined as any excessive and/or forceful communication with or use of a Web server or online system. Although web hosting providers offer integrated modules that are specifically designed to help webmasters maximize spam prevention, there are certain measures that website owners can take to completely eliminate site spam.

Why Should Spam Be Prevented?

Spam is a threat not only to the security but also to the productivity of every online business. Most websites become successful because of their continually updated content, which is of a high quality that visitors gain interest in. However, if your site becomes heavily populated with unmoderated spam comments and low-quality content, it is possible to experience a significant reduction in daily traffic levels and search engine rankings. In fact, it is even possible to be completely de-indexed from some search engines because of a large volume of spam on your site. Spam can also be seen in the form of automated e-mails that are submitted through contact forms on your website. E-mail spam can cause webmasters to waste a lot of time in cleaning up their inbox, reducing productivity and ultimately lowering the value and responsiveness of their customer service.

What Is a Captcha Script?

A captcha script is basically a script that is installed on your website which displays a unique image containing a random combination of characters (including letters, numbers, and sometimes symbols), which visitors must input into a form box to verify that they are not automated robots. Since captcha scripts actually create unique images spontaneously, bots are not able to read or decode them as they would be able to do with regular text. As computer programs are not able to actually view and interpret images, it is extremely unlikely that a bot will be created in the future that can decipher captcha images. Thus, captcha scripts are an effective long-term way to prevent automated spam and ensure that all of your site commenters and anyone sending you an e-mail is actually a human being.

How to Use Captcha Scripts

To use a captcha script you simply need to paste the code snippet into the coding of any form or input field. This will cause the script to randomly generate a captcha image any time the form is loaded on a webpage, making it so no information can be successfully entered into the form without the visitor first solving the associated captcha. Captcha codes can be generated in various programming languages, including PHP, ASP, and NET, making it a flexible and highly compatible spam prevention tool that can be utilized on any web site.

Spam is perhaps one of the most hated terms on the internet, and this is not surprising, considering how many people lose hours of work each day in an effort to prevent and eliminate spam form their inboxes and web sites. Conventional email spam is bad enough, however there is another type of spam that is even more annoying – web hosting spam.  This type of spam usually plagues your web site in the form of user comments, repetitive user posts, and an overwhelming amount of junk emails via your site’s “contact us” form. Unfortunately, this type of spam is much more difficult to prevent than conventional email spam, which can be combated with a simple spam folder and a blacklist. The following tips can help you overcome web hosting spam and keep your web site free from this type of spam.

Preventing Spam Comments

There are many webmasters that will attempt to build backlinks to their web site by leaving spam comments on your pages automatically with the help of automated software. To prevent such spam attacks you will need to make sure you are actively monitoring your site comments, as well as utilizing anti-spam tools within your web hosting control panel. All modern web hosting accounts have anti-spam utilities such as Spam Hammer that will let you set filters and prevent comments that may be easily identified as spam. For example, you can create a filter to prevent comments form containing links, which would greatly eliminate spam by discouraging spammers form leaving links on your site.

Securing Contact Forms

Some spammers will spam your web site’s contact form, sending automated emails repeatedly to overload your inbox and make your job as a webmaster difficult. This is often done by the competition, so it is very important to make sure measures are taken to prevent such spam attacks as quickly as possible, especially if you have an eCommerce site or a site that advertises your services, as you will need to be able to respond to customer and client inquiries. Fortunately, you can set filters and limits within your web hosting control panel that will keep a single IP address form sending too many emails in a row. This will greatly reduce the amount of spam emails you’ll receive.

Using Captcha Images

One of the best ways to deter spammers is through the use of Captcha forms that will prevent spammers from using automated software to attack your web site with spam. Captcha forms are basically images that contain letters and numbers that are difficult to read, and nearly impossible for a software to decipher. Thus, using Captcha forms on your web site will greatly reduce the amount of automated spam on your web site. Since spammers will no longer be able to use automated bots to fill in forms, create user accounts, and post content on your site, you will be eliminating the majority of web hosting spam.

Website security is composed of many factors, and each factor is just as important as the next. A single vulnerability in the security of your website could lead to a massive lapse that results in data loss and possibly even fraud. Many people overlook one of the most common security threats, and that is spam. Although spam does not seem like a security threat at first glance, when you realize the detrimental effects spam is capable of causing, you soon realize it is a serious issue that needs to be addressed with any website.

How is Spam Dangerous?

Spam is a security threat because it compromises the integrity and validity of your website. Your site gains success due to authenticity and quality content. If you;re site is flooded with spam comments, then the of the quality content you worked to produce can instantly become littered with content that takes away from the overall quality of your website. This ultimately results in loss of traffic and even a decrease in your search engine ranking. In fact, many people have been de-indexed from the search engines due to a high amount of spam on their website. Most spammers place comments on your web pages that link to their website, in efforts to get quick backlinks with very little work. Instead of doing this manually they use programs called bots to do the commenting for them. However there is a way to stop these bots from commenting on your site, using Captcha.

What is Captcha?

Captcha is an image verification module that is used to verify whether or not someone is a real person. If you have signed up for an email address before, then you have probably seen a Captcha box before. It is a strange looking image with oddly shaped characters in it, also it is very difficult for a program to decipher the image content. The Captcha box prompts the user  to enter in the information sen in the image to verify that the user is indeed a genuine human being.

What Other Ways Can Captcha Protect My Site?

Another way that Captcha is useful in protecting your site from spammers is that it protects your site from false user registration. Instead of just preventing spam comments and fraudulent user registration, Captcha can also be used to prevent bots from doing anything else on your website that you would only want genuine human beings doing, such as contacting you via email using your sites contact form. Many times your competitors or hackers will bombard your business inbox with spam using the contact  form on your website which is directly linked to your business email. If you don’t use Captcha to protect your contact form from spammers, then you could find yourself trying to delete a sea of spam from your inbox. The main reason why this method works so well to spam people, is because the spam folder in the business email is not going to recognize the emails as spam, since the emails are coming from the contact form of your own website. For this reason it is absolutely imperative to use Captcha with your website in every way possible.

Spam is by far the most annoying concept in existence on the internet, aggravating thousands of webmasters and contributing to the defacing of just as many websites on a daily basis. Spam wastes time, money, server space, and energy, by clogging up email boxes, and even worse, cluttering the comments sections of nearly every unsecured blog. Spam is like the prank phone call of the internet, and in order to stop it, you’ll need to take a few measures that will prevent spammers form accessing the information they need.

Email Privacy

Perhaps the most common form of spam is email spam, which reduces your productivity by populating your inbox with unwanted spam posts. To avoid the aggravation associated with email spam, you should consider keeping your email private at any expense. That means you should not post your email address on forums, chat rooms, blogs, websites, or any other venues that can be publicly viewed by spammers. If you absolutely must to display your email address publicly online, then consider writing it without the @ symbol. For example – nospamexampleemailaddress at exampleemail dot com. The reasoning behind this is actually quite simple; spammers usually use programs that automatically search the web and scrape lists of email addresses by searching for @ symbols. Writing your email address in the above format is a great way to prevent spammers form finding your email address automatically.

Preventing Contact Form Attacks

Another way spammers can access your business email is through the “Contact Us” form on your website. If you have a contact form enabled on your website, you’ll need to make sure you have security measures in place to prevent spammers from using bots to repeatedly send emails through your contact form. Spammers love using this method to exploit business inboxes, because most contact forms only require a few simple fields to be filled out, such as name, email address, and subject. To prevent spam attacks from automated bots through your contact form, you’ll need to require the use of a Captcha form, which only a valid human could fill out.

Captcha

The Captcha test is is an entry field that is used to prevent hackers from exploiting sites with automated programs. If you have ever created an email account, then you have probably seen a Captcha form before. Captcha basically generates an image complete with a variety of letters and characters, and then requires the user to input the information on the screen. In the early days o Captcha, the images generated were simple, and as hackers adjusted to these Captcha images, the developers had to increase the difficulty of these images. The modern versions of the Captcha system consist of two to three words and are very difficult to circumvent.

Conclusion

Although spam is a common problem and is not going to disappear any time soon, there are measures that can be taken to keep spammers from targeting your email. The first step in preventing spam would be following the recommendations above and using common sense when it comes to distributing your business email address. If you’re still having trouble with spam attacks from more determined individuals like your competitors, then you may want to employ the services of a spam blocking program.