Regardless of what business you run I would argue that a web site is essential. It's a shop window for you to advertise what you sell or what you do.

Some businesses start off with just a Google Business listing of a Facebook page. The problem with this is that you must conform to those platforms and their rules. With your own web site you can add whatever content you want, when you want and do extra things that other platforms won't allow.

Sometimes making the leap and setting up your web site is seen as a set it up and forget job. You set up the web site and that's it, you don't do anything with it for a few years. That's the problem we came across with a new customer.

Steve has had a web site hosted with someone else for three years and like many people although he's not that technical, he realises that he does need a web site. He set up the site and forgot about it until he discovered there was a problem.

All of a sudden Steve noticed that he wasn't getting any enquiries from new customers through his web site. After many e-mails and phone calls to his hosting company the reason became clear - his web site was infected with a virus.

Unfortunately Steve's hosting company took the approach of 'the hosting is fine, it's the web site that's the problem and so there's nothing we can do'. This is the typical response from web hosting companies because they do not want to get involved with fixing issues with web sites but we see it differently.

We took over the hosting of Steve's site and immediately cleared up the infected files (we found 37!), updated the site to the latest version of Joomla and then added extra layers of protection to prevent the site from being infected again.

Your web site is one of, if not the biggest, ways that customers find you. If your web site isn't working for some reason that can have a huge impact on your business. That's why we are now offering extra protection on all Joomla and WordPress web sites that we host for our customers.

At no extra cost, we will add an extra layer of protection to your sites which includes:

• Regular manual virus scanning
• Additional firewall at site level
• Continuous monitoring for changes to site files
• Regular updates to Joomla / WordPress to ensure that the site and all of its plugins are kept up-to-date

This is combined with our standard hosting features which ensure your site stays safe, including:

• 24/7 monitoring of the server hardware
• 99.999% guaranteed uptime
• 4x daily backups of your site and e-mails

You can find more information on our 'Extra Protect' services here or get in touch.