Posts Tagged ‘monitoring’

Posted by: Jeff Leget, Director of Operations

A ClickBank client recently asked me about the tools we use to monitor and secure our systems so that he could learn more about monitoring and securing his own systems. So today I’m writing about some of the simple tools ClickBank uses to secure our servers and how those tools might benefit publishers and affiliates.

First, I think it is important to understand what parts of your technology are integral to your core business and what parts should be outsourced. At ClickBank, we use external outsourced data centers for many of our services. We want to focus our energy on providing innovative solutions that support your business, not building world-class data centers. Many ClickBank clients already outsource their Web services, because creating and promoting great products is their core business. A service provider can offer uptime guarantees, redundant network connections, and much more. These options can make your Web site significantly more complicated if you manage them yourself.

You should make sure that you always have multiple copies of your Web site code, both on and off the Web servers themselves. A disaster with your service provider doesn’t have to be a disaster for you. In addition, your Web site should also be protected from DoS (Denial of Service) attacks. You or your service provider should invest in tools that inspect your Web traffic. Web servers like Apache (with modEvasive or modSecurity) have the ability to handle or dynamically block traffic that doesn’t meet requirements. For example, if you receive 1000 requests in a row to your Web site for pages that don’t exist, the IP address requesting those pages should be blocked.

Regardless of whether or not you outsource facets of your Web site, you should monitor it from at least one external source. In addition to extensive internal monitoring, ClickBank subscribes to several external Web-monitoring services. These services include:
· http://www.alertra.com
· http://www.internetsupervision.com
· http://www.site24×7.com
· http://www.siteuptime.com

There are many others as well. These services often offer free monitoring at low levels (every 30 minutes to 1 hour) from a single location. Any downtime is automatically reported to you via email or text message. Paid subscription services often offer higher monitoring rates from various locations around the globe. Some services allow you to monitor content on the page. This enables you to make sure that your Web site is not hacked or modified without your knowledge. Other services like www.dnsstuff.com allow you to check the completeness of your Web site domain, the associated DNS entries, and potential email blacklists. It is important to make sure that the rest of the world views your Web site the same way you do.

Finally, for publishers, it is extremely important that you protect your product download itself. ClickBank allows each publisher to use the ClickBank Proof of Purchase to ensure that every purchase of your product is legitimate. A description of how to verify the Proof of Purchase, along with the code to perform this action, is available at:

http://www.clickbank.com/publisher_tools.html#Publisher_Tools_7

We work hard at ClickBank to build and maintain a secure and stable platform for our clients and customers. I hope that some of these tips help you to do the same.