TL; DR: Gate.com is helping SMBs and agencies keep their WordPress sites secure, lightning-fast, and consistently up to date with its turnkey managed hosting solution. The reliable platform provides peace of mind with features like friendly 24/7 support, advanced threat protection, SEO tools, and a 100% uptime guarantee. Ultimately, Gate.com’s goal is to take on the burden of network infrastructure so customers can focus on their core business missions.
Some say ignorance is bliss, but it’s certainly not a virtue when it comes to network security.
The current threat landscape — swarming with malware, phishing attempts, and brute-force attacks — has forced today’s businesses to keep security top of mind.
According to John Enright, President at NetNation, even the smallest businesses are waking up to the risks. After all, the average site is more interactive than ever before — and therefore harbors more of the private customer data that lures in malicious actors.
“We periodically survey our customers to learn about their biggest pain points when it comes to web presence,” John said. “Security always comes through loud and clear — it’s far more important to them than any other aspect. It’s what keeps people up at night.”
Gate.com, a subsidiary of NetNation, wants its customers to achieve peace of mind despite the complexity of today’s cybersecurity environment. The company designed its turnkey managed WordPress platform specifically to remove the burden of network infrastructure, allowing users to instead focus on core business objectives.
The enterprise-grade solution is well-suited for SMBs and creative agencies looking for secure managed WordPress hosting in a dedicated virtual machine environment. An innovative control panel allows users to easily manage their site as needed.
The platform also includes advanced threat protection, SEO tools, a 100% uptime guarantee, and 24/7 access to friendly WordPress experts who ensure customers’ sites are kept safe and up to date. The company’s free migrations are also a breeze, with end to end service from the company’s experience team and zero downtime.
Protection from Brute-Force Attacks, Malware, and Other Exploitations
John told us that the internet isn’t all that different from the physical world in terms of the criminal mind.
“You can’t assume that, because you run a small flower shop, someone in another country won’t try to hack into your network,” he said. “It’s like leaving your door unlocked in a parking lot. Criminals aren’t going to target you directly; they’re randomly pulling on car doors to see which one’s open. The internet is the same way.”
With the Gate.com, customers can rest assured that no key is left unlocked.
The company’s managed WordPress solutions are centered on the customer experience, pairing lightning-fast performance with supercharged support. This way, customers can leave security, updates, and speed to the experts while focusing on their daily tasks.
Sites are protected by a dedicated, firewalled virtual machine environment that is monitored by security experts around the clock.
“All of our solutions are on virtual machines — Gate.com is not a shared multitenant platform,” John said. “It’s architected to be inherently secure out of the box.”
Managed plans include Imunify360, a six-layered server protection solution, and AI-based Smart Updates, which keeps criminals from infiltrating sites via outdated themes and plug-ins. With WordPress, ensuring the platform is up to date at all times is critical, as hackers often exploit in out-of-date software.
“Imunify360 is an awesome security tool that is constantly looking for attempted connections to your site and making sure that it’s completely walled off from a firewall perspective,” John said.
The technology uses machine learning and algorithms to collect security insights from across the globe, helping identify potential threats and secure sites via proactive patch management.
The Smart Updates feature, on the other hand, creates a clone of the customer’s site to test updates pre-implementation. Michael Stoyanov, Product Manager at NetNation, said the module provides a side-by-side comparison designed to highlight potential changes.
“This ensures that updates are done in a very structured and organized way,” Michael said. “It also helps avoid a situation in which WordPress breaks your site — one of the biggest issues with WordPress updates.”
Offload Technical Worries with Turnkey Site Management
Michael told us Gate.com designed its Plesk-based control panel to be as user-friendly as possible.
“We streamlined a lot of the options that would have made for a complex and confusing server management experience,” he said. “Because this is a managed service, we want to make sure the customer can focus entirely on their business and their website content. We take care of the rest.”
John said most SMBs are more than happy to offload the responsibility of managing the intricacies of WordPress and server management.
“An online presence is undoubtedly a game-changer for businesses, but hosting can be pretty hard to navigate for someone who isn’t a technology expert,” he said. “We’re taking best-of-breed tools, including the WordPress Toolkit by Plesk, and gluing them together so non-technical WordPress users can ensure their sites are secure out of the box.”
At the same time, customers can choose to maintain control over infrastructure as needed. For example, advanced users may choose not to update a custom plugin due to the risk of overwriting code.
“Customers can access all of the high-level tools in the background if they choose to,” John said. “And customers who just want to focus on the publishing aspect of their workflow can streamline the process significantly.”
Agencies that manage dozens of client sites, for example, can apply the same updates to multiple instances in bulk, saving significant time and frustration.
Delivering Affordable Rates without Sacrificing Around-the-Clock Support
According to John, Gate.com’s solutions are priced to put managed WordPress hosting within reach for SMBs and agencies.
“Relative to others in the space, we start at a much lower price point,” he said. “Usually, when you get to the level of virtual machines and support for multiple sites, there’s a much higher threshold to get started.”
Many other managed WordPress providers offer hosting in environments shared by thousands of other tenants. When the applications and data of multiple customers are hosted on the same server, it’s possible for one customer with exceptionally high bandwidth and processing demands to negatively affect site performance for other users.
Security is also a concern: If a malicious actor breaches one site on a shared server with weak security measures, others may suffer the same consequences.
The plans are also quite affordable considering that customers can get in touch with a living, breathing human via chat, phone, or email at a moment’s notice. The majority of the company’s more than 250 full-time employees have more than five years of experience in hosting and network security.
John said Gate.com’s greatest assets include the team’s vast field experience and passion for helping customers leverage the capabilities of WordPress.
“Our support team is watching 24/7 to keep sites secure,” John said. “This type of service has existed in enterprise space, but until now, few have focused on it from the small business perspective — even though it’s such a huge concern.”
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