Alternative to Sitelock

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lavalamp213
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Alternative to Sitelock

Post by lavalamp213 »

Hi
I have sitelock through my web host but they just doubled the price and I did a little research and it seems that it is probably something I don#t really need.
On a wordpress site there are many free alternatives for malware scanning but what about on my phpbb board?

Do I need sitelock?
Is there an alternative?

Thanks!
Last edited by thecoalman on Tue Apr 06, 2021 11:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Moved to general discussion.
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david63
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Re: Alternative to Sitelock

Post by david63 »

have you tried a Google search for "sitelock alternatives"? I just had over 100k results
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lavalamp213
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Re: Alternative to Sitelock

Post by lavalamp213 »

Yeah, that's the thing. There's a million and I can't believe they are all good.

One thing I'd like to know is, is there any argument that says I don't need a malware protection service?
What do these services even do?

Sorry, but I just got socked with a big bill to continue Sitelock which led me to question it and I googled and found a lot of info that says it's expensive and not worth it.

The last thing I want to do is waste time with another useless malware "service".

I'm really looking for anyone's experience or expertise with this, specifically for forums.
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david63
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Re: Alternative to Sitelock

Post by david63 »

Unless you are running your own server I would have thought that all of this was taken care of by your hosts.

I have certainly never had to install anything along these lines on any site that I have been running
David
Remember: You only know what you know and - you don't know what you don't know!

I now no longer support any of my extensions but they will start to become available here
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lavalamp213
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Re: Alternative to Sitelock

Post by lavalamp213 »

The hosts are who push sitelock.
But I think you're right. I'm on a shared server so they better be keeping it safe for everyone.

I'm getting the feeling it doesn't make sense to pay extra for these services and hoping for some guidance.

Thanks!
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thecoalman
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Re: Alternative to Sitelock

Post by thecoalman »

If I may ask what is total for the hosting and Sitelock?

I'm not familiar with Sitelock but looking over the features most of what they provide is covered by Cloudflare. The big one is the DDOS protection as that is not something you can easily or cheaply do on your own. Cloudflare offers free plan for most of those features including DDOS protection, note they do not guarantee to stand by your site without a paid plan. Paid plans start at $20 per month and guarantees DDOS protection no matter what the scale of the attack.

Another thing you can't do on your own is the cached content. Not sure about Sitelock but CL has a massive global network that handles a substantial amount of the world's internet traffic. They leverage this by caching content in different data centers across the globe speeding up the delivery of cacheable files. When someone requests a page across the globe from your server the cached files like images, CSS, JS etc are served from local data center.

Interesting observation, if you are paying your host for this they are profiting with a decrease of the load on their own services. Seems a bit of conflict of interest.

The one thing that stands out abut the Sitelock features not offered by Cloudflare is the malware scanning. This is something that should be the responsibility of your host for shared hosting since what you neighbors are doing affects you. ClamAV is pretty standard on most servers, it's open source and doesn't cost anything but resources. This can't be installed and run by someone using shared hosting.
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lavalamp213
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Re: Alternative to Sitelock

Post by lavalamp213 »

I paid $35 for sitelock last year and this year it renewed (without warning me) for $85 for the year. They told me that sitelock had "upgraded" and that was the reason for the increase.

The main function is the malware scan and "repair." And it really seems like the host should be attending to that for the sake of everyone on the shared server.

Anyway, i googled "is sitelock worth it?" and the resounding conclusion seems to be "no". It's just a pricey add-on that hosts try to get you in.

Anyway, I cancelled it this morning and got a full refund.

I tried cloudflare once and it seemed to cause a lot of trouble on my board, blocking people from logging in and slowing the whole thing down. I shut it off and everything was fine again.

I seem to be doing all right without it.

I've been pleased with my host service for the most part and I can't blame them for pushing the add-ons, it's just for me it nothing but a pain in the ass to deal with trying to figure out if I need them, if cancelling is a huge mistake or something I won't even notice. And maybe there are other add-ons that would be an enhancement so I don't want to throw away $$ on stuff that brings minimal benefit.

I've also got a back-up service coming up for renewal (codeguard basic) that I am really considering dropping since I will have to upgrade it because my board has exceeded their limit. I'll have to sort out a system for doing my own backups I guess.

I might look at all this differently if my board generated an income for me or something but mostly it's just an expense so I can't justify a ton of bells and whistles.
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thecoalman
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Re: Alternative to Sitelock

Post by thecoalman »

lavalamp213 wrote: Tue Apr 06, 2021 12:56 pm The main function is the malware scan and "repair." And it really seems like the host should be attending to that for the sake of everyone on the shared server.
That may be the main function they advertise but as you have correctly noted that should be something that is the responsibility of your host.
I've also got a back-up service coming up for renewal (codeguard basic) that I am really considering dropping since I will have to upgrade it because my board has exceeded their limit. I'll have to sort out a system for doing my own backups I guess.
Using windows scheduler and WinSCP you can schedule backups nightly or whatever floats your boat. There is sync feature that will download new or changed files from the server to local folder.

I believe there is extension for phpBB for automatic backups. You would actually be able to use WinSCP to manage this by deleting the files on the server after they were downloaded. There is plenty of free and very reliable options for backup.
I might look at all this differently if my board generated an income for me or something but mostly it's just an expense so I can't justify a ton of bells and whistles.
I wouldn't disagree with you. Other than the expense they can complicate things especially if you don't understand how to use them or can't fully utilize them. The DDOS protection is the one must have feature if your site is prone to being attacked but that is something that requires a bit more configuration on the server end to fully protect a site. Those configurations are not possible with shared hosting.


-------edit------
lavalamp213 wrote: Tue Apr 06, 2021 12:56 pm I tried cloudflare once and it seemed to cause a lot of trouble on my board, blocking people from logging in and slowing the whole thing down. I shut it off and everything was fine again.
Just wanted to add this is likely configuration problem on your end. When you deploy CL as proxy server all of the IP's accessing your server are from Cloudflare. This could be a problem with phpBB security settings and can also cause other problems like server logs not having the real IP of the user. To prevent this you need to install and configure either mod_cloudflare or mod_remoteip. This can't be done with shared hosting.

As a band aid there is a phpBB extension for this however that only affects IP's being recorded by phpBB. Server logs and anything else recording the IP would still have CL IP's.
“Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I have found several thousand things that won’t work.”

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lavalamp213
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Re: Alternative to Sitelock

Post by lavalamp213 »

Thank you so much!
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