In today's world, no business can afford to be offline or not selling. One out of five companies gets affected by a big break every five years and majority (92%), those have a disaster like fire or flood, couldnt survive anymore. So, you must make continuity plan for your business - have you focused on right matters? Are your business's critical data and systems truly secure and safe?

What are the primary things you think about when hosting a website? Obviously, a hosting company, low price - also could be, first-class support and of course reliability. If you're a webmaster, then you will consider some other valuable features also. There are numerous programs and management tools offered to make your site distinguished one, but I am quite sure there are a couple of other features you will not think of at all. Much ignored - but you must not overlook these necessary security features as these are essential to secure your web hosting environment from great threats.

Though, there are plenty of security features but there are few you just cannot go without them:

Secure File Transfer Protocol or SFTP: SFTP is powerful, well-organized and secure edition of FTP. When just pure, FTP transfers files, making them open to number of security breaks including eavesdropping, tampering and sometimes grabbing of the whole file. With secure web hosting, your hosting provider will offer you SFTP enabling you to secure your files in transfer using SSH (Secure Shell Host) - a feature that protects information with government recommended 128-bit encryption.

Secure Sockets Layer or SSL: If you are selling your products or services on your site then you must have SSL integrated on your site. SSL is a normal encryption protocol aimed to protect internet interactions. If your web host doesn't support a shared or private SSL certificate, you must switch to any other hosting provider.

Frequent Data Backups: Data backup and restoring is not just a practice done with the files on the hard drive, but it is equally important with the files on web host’s server. just a single technical difficulty to your hosting provider can lose a server and all of your valuable data on site. Fortunately, almost all web hosting companies take backups so that their client's data can be restored in any case of collapse. But, to get even more secure, I would recommend you to sign up with a hosting provider that can offer you a tool to backup your own data as there are companies offering such utility.

Utmost Network Security: Besides ensuring the security of your personal files and website transactions, you should also look for the security features that protect your web host's network. Learn how the potential web hosting company has protected their infrastructure; consider it with basic features like intrusion detection systems, firewalls, DDoS protection, virus and spam filtering. Hackers and malicious code writers mainly target web servers so if their hardware is transgressed or crashes, your site may also get affected with it.

Your web host should offer the above told web hosting security features to ensure the security of your websites data. Hackers are always seeking ways to crack the web servers whereas malware writers are developing latest infectious threats each day. A web hosting company that does not acknowledge their importance by not including them in his packages is actually leaving you unprotected for exploitation.