Category: Product Updates

Since its launch in 2011, our Site Scanner website security service has helped hundreds of thousands of website owners protect their sites from destructive hacks, data theft and reputation damages via early detection of malicious software. We’ve been constantly improving the service for even higher website security by adding more functionalities, such as deep file scan done directly on the server in its previous update last year. Now we’re enhancing the existing Site Scanner service by adding a Site protect feature to it and we are also introducing a new premium plan that includes two more types of automatic scans and a quarantine option for malicious files.

What Is Site Scanner

Our Site Scanner feature is a security service that’s crafted to protect your website by:

• Detecting malware and the latest threats that might affect your website;
• Warning you about such potential threats at an early stage and in a timely manner;
• NEW: Providing you with tools for reaction if your site is under attack. 

In order to do the above, Site Scanner runs a range of scans and checks on your website in search of any signs of malware daily. If it identifies a threat, you get notified by email which gives you enough time to react in case of any danger to your website security. With our latest Site Scanner version update we’re also adding tools that allow you to react and minimize the impact when your website is under attack.

The service now comes in two plans: Basic Site Scanner, which is an enhanced version of our current SG Site Scanner, and Premium Site Scanner, which includes a brand new set of features. Read on to learn more about each of these plans.

What’s Included in our Site Scanner Basic Plan

The Basic Site Scanner includes many functionalities that will detect and warn you about malware at an early stage, but now we’ve added a brand new feature that will allow you to minimize any damage in case of an attack, and further protect your website.

NEW FEATURE: Site protect

If you get a malware notification or you suspect that your website was compromised, you can now manage four different on/off options from the Site protect interface. They allow you to temporarily disable all file uploads to your website by three different methods: disabling FTP and/or SSH transfers, and disabling file upload via PHP. The fourth on/off option prevents the execution of malicious scripts on the server. While any of these options are enabled, you can safely review the site status and ensure that no additional threats can reach it. This gives you some time to assess the situation, take action to clean any malicious code on your site, and minimize the damage. Once you are sure that your site is safe, you can switch off the respective option from the Site protect interface and resume file uploads again.

URLs scan

The automatic URLs scan crawls your website URLs every day and checks if there is publicly detectable malware on your website.

Domain blacklist check

We automatically check whether your domain has been blacklisted for malware by some of the most popular and authoritative search engines, browsers and anti-virus databases. The blacklist check takes into consideration information from Google, Yandex, Chrome, Firefox, Norton, McAfee and many more.

On-demand manual scan (URLs, domain, and files)

With the Basic Site Scanner you can manually run an advanced scan of your site that will not only check your site URLs and your domain blacklist status, but will also make a comprehensive scan of all your files hosted on our server.

Email Reporting

You get immediately notified if our automatic scans detect anything suspicious with your site. Additionally, you will also get a weekly email summary of your website status.

30-day scan history

You can find a 30-day history of your site scans in your Site Scanner interface with the scan results and detailed information about threats and malware (if any).

NEW: Premium Plan With Awesome Additional Features

We now offer a Premium plan of our Site Scanner service that includes all the above-listed functionalities from the Basic plan, plus some premium-exclusive features for even more enhanced website security.

Daily automatic files scan

Whereas our Basic plan daily scan only checks your URLs and domain for publicly detectable threats, our Premium plan goes deeper. It includes our most thorough check, which goes automatically through every file of your website on the server and looks for malware, suspicious code that may remain publicly unnoticed.

File upload scan

With the file upload scan we will check every new file being uploaded to your site, through File Manager, FTP, WordPress backend or else. This is one of our best prevention tools that can detect malware as soon as it appears and notify you immediately with an instant email notification.

File upload quarantine

The Premium Site Scanner allows you to switch on an automatic quarantine. If you choose to do so, any newly uploaded file that is detected to be malicious will be automatically placed in quarantine (separate folder, outside of your document root), so that it does not become active on your website. You will then be able to manage each of these quarantined files separately, having the option to either restore them to their original location, or delete them. File upload quarantine is a powerful tool that may protect your site in times of an attack.

If you’d like to learn more about protecting your website and see the Site Scanner tool in action, watch the recording of our recent webinar that explains the different levels of protection websites get on our platform and the benefits of using our Site Scanner tool:

Activate or Upgrade Site Scanner for Your Site Now

If you still don’t use our Site Scanner service, we strongly recommend that you activate it to keep your site safe from malware. To purchase the Basic or Premium version of our Site Scanner security service for your site, go to your Client Area > Marketplace > Hosting Services > Additional Services. 

If you’re already using our Site Scanner service, you’ve been automatically switched to the Basic plan and all its latest features are now available for you to use. As a special offer for all our long-time Site Scanner users, we now offer a free upgrade to the Premium Plan until the end of your current service period. (Your Site Scanner should have been activated before June 15, 2022, in order to be eligible for the offer, regular Premium Site Scanner renewal prices apply after the end of your current term.)

To upgrade to the Premium version log in to your Client Area.

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We are now introducing our own Private DNS service, which allows you to customize the default name servers on our platform for enhanced online privacy and completely white-label hosting. It takes full advantage of our centralized DNS service, which was built to ensure faster domain name resolving for a faster website loading, enhanced reliability, and easy DNS management, and which also formed the basis for our own Cloud-based Content Delivery Network to additionally improve site performance.

Introducing our Private DNS service

The DNS service translates the domain names (pages’ URLs) to the numerical IP addresses of the servers hosting the website content. Thus instead of visitors having to type a combination of numbers in the browser, they can use letters and words. Thanks to our centralized DNS service, all domains registered with SiteGround are now using the same default name servers: ns1.siteground.net and ns2.siteground.net. Our Private DNS service makes it possible to change those to your own custom name servers, based on your own domain names or your brand. It allows you to point all your websites’ domains to these unique name servers. For example:

• ns1.mydomainname.com
• ns2.mydomainname.com

What are the benefits of our new Private DNS service?

Enhanced online privacy

Using custom domain server names helps enhance your online privacy. The Private DNS service hides the default ns1.siteground.net and ns2.siteground.net name servers. This obfuscation of the information makes it harder for third parties to find out where exactly your domain is located, which hinders them from taking advantage of potential issues that may arise on the servers.

Completely white-label hosting

The Private DNS service is especially useful for white-label resellers. If you wish to offer hosting to your clients, but you don’t wish them to know that the service is provided by SiteGround and have them communicate with us directly, using the Private DNS is a great idea. That will help you conceal who’s the original host, which makes you the sole provider and increases your brand name visibility.

How to activate and manage the Private DNS service?

You can activate Private DNS for your domain from Client Area > Marketplace > Hosting Services > Additional Services. You get this service for free if you are on a GoGeek or Cloud hosting plan. The Private DNS is also available on a yearly subscription basis for all other customers who want to use this service. To be able to enable Private DNS for your domain name, it must be registered with SiteGround.

To manage and view your DNS information, you can do so from Client Area > Services > Domains > Manage (for the associated domain) > Extras.

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Our SG Site Scanner service has been one of the most valued tools by our clients since we launched it back in 2017. It has helped tens of thousands of site owners to protect their sites from destructive hacks, data theft and reputation damages via early detection of malicious software. For the last four years, sites subscribed to our SG Site Scanner service had their URLs crawled for suspicious code and their domain reputation checked daily. Now, our clients using the service will also be able to run a thorough file scan of their site directly on the host server with a single click. Read below to learn how this new scanning method enhances the existing site scanner functionality. 

Daily URL scans and domain blacklist status checks 

As always, we will continue to scan the publicly available URLs of any site that is subscribed to our SG Site Scanner on a daily basis. This is a powerful method for detecting malicious code and infected file locations by scanning your public website source code. Additionally, we do reputation checks of the website domain by looking for it in the blacklists of security authorities like Google, PhishTank, McAfee and more. If a Site Scanner-subscribed domain is present in any of them, the owner gets an immediate notification.

NEW: Comprehensive file scans on demand

Apart from the automatic daily checks described above, the SG Site Scanner service also includes the option for an on-demand scan to be initiated by the customers in their Site Tools. Now on top of the Daily URL scans, these on-demand scans include a new scanning method, developed in-house by our DevOps team. The new method is a deep file scan done directly on the server. It can detect malware that is not publicly accessible and thus can be missed by the external URL scans. For example, if the malicious code is located in a password-protected folder, it will not be found by the URL scan, but the new file scan will easily detect it.

An additional benefit of the file scan is that it uses its own comprehensive definitions about what is malicious code and thus can catch threads that may be missed by the URL scan. Another big advantage of the file scan is that it can give you valuable information about the location of a problem that has already been detected by the URL scan. This information can make cleaning a hacked website much easier.

How to take advantage of the extended scanning capabilities?

All clients who already have the SG Site Scanner activated can log in to their Site Tools > Security > SG Site Scanner and click to run an on-demand scan. If domain is pointed to our servers, the scan will include the new files checks too, on top of the URL scan and the blacklist status checks.

We strongly recommend that each site have an active SG Site Scanner at all times. The service has proven over the years to be essential for keeping sites safe and preventing data loss and downtime. It now has an unmatched value thanks to the unique additional scanning method available. If you don’t have it yet, you can find it in your Client Area > Marketplace > Hosting Services.

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