Combell Shield: with this unique defense system, hackers don’t stand a chance

Combell Shield is a collection of defense systems. With it, we provide complete protection for your hosting package. And the best part? It's completely free! Because we offer it to you by default and for free. In this blog post, we will answer the most important questions about our digital shield.

What is Combell Shield?

Combell Shield protects everyone who has a web hosting package with Combell. Our digital shield comprises a multitude of security solutions that allow us to block attacks and malware, even before they reach our customers.

Good thing too! Anyone who visits a news site knows that more and more malicious parties are roaming the Internet to abuse vulnerable websites. That is why it is very important that your website is properly secured.

Updates twice a week

Any child who once has played "as a knight" will tell you: the best way to defend against vicious attackers is with a shield, and a metal shield will work better than one made of a cardboard. Combell thinks the same when it comes to digital attacks. That is why we make sure the Combell Shield is made of the best 'materials': from logical interventions to advanced technologies.

That is not all. Combell Shield is accompanied by so-called lifecycle management. This means that we keep everything up-to-date on our side, because protecting customers with old-fashioned software is not done. We do updates twice a week, unless we have to do it faster because of security flaws in certain systems.

What are the benefits of Combell Shield?

Best protected web hosting

Combell Shield protects all customers who use our shared hosting (or web hosting). With web hosting, several customers share a server to store their website (neatly separated from each other).

You can rest assured: Combell uses the highest standards for web hosting. While with other hosting companies, you can often be inconvenienced by other websites on your shared server, with Combell, you will not notice this at all. And especially not with our Combell Shield!

Additional customer service

As our customer, you are generally responsible for updates to your systems yourself. Yet it can happen that due to lack of time you are still stuck with older software, which can cause problems. For example: your site no longer working properly, being hacked, loss of income due to downtime ...

Therefore, we scan ourselves for clients using older software (PHP versions), and whether clients' code is ready for a new version. When it is, we contact the customer three times. Without a response, we perform that update ourselves. This is in the best interest of everyone, so customers are satisfied with this as well.

Even less chance of downtime

When your website or application is unreachable, it can cost you a lot of money in missed customers or lost revenues. Fortunately, our Combell Shield includes a GateKeeper. This system ensures greater accessibility of your website or application.

In the past, when you wanted to add a caching layer to your hosting, you had to change your DNS settings. That downtime is a thing of the past: you no longer have to change anything when you add caching to your hosting package.

Monitoring your visitor capacity

Another nice benefit: our shield monitors the visitor capacity of each website. When the request limit (rate limit) of a certain website is exceeded, we can check whether these requests are reliable. If necessary, our experts will increase the request limit for that website.

Scanning for vulnerabilities

Combell Shield scans the source code of all the applications behind the shield for 'holes' that could lead to zero-day attacks. If your CMS system is no longer up-to-date, your site is vulnerable to such attacks.

For Combell Shield, Combell teams up with Patchman in order to provide optimal and, above all, quick protection to customers, thanks to automatic patching. Often, we even provide virtual patches faster than the software manufacturers can provide official updates.

Malware detection

Of course, Combell Shield also performs traditional malware scans. Each virus has its own 'signature', and based on signature detection, Combell Shield looks for those signatures in the public files of our hosting customers.

When we discover malware in those files, we automatically remove it, but we also inform our customer that there is dirt in his files.

Because we keep all our customers' system environments strictly separate - that's what we call "jailing" - other customers won't be affected when one customer is hit by malware, but of course we don't want to host a single customer with malware.

How does Combell Shield work?

Our Combell Shield protects you by combining many defense mechanisms into one big digital shield. That works quite simply.

Blocking IP addresses

Every visitor who wants to connect to a website hosted by Combell, must pass through the Combell Shield platform. This way, we can already detect and block simple threats. Usually, these are malicious bots that send a lot of requests to a website from a certain IP address, in order to shut down that website.

Combell Shield does this very carefully, and can even intervene on the level of individual customers and websites. If, for instance, a web store mainly has customers in the Benelux, and is attacked with a DDoS attack, we can block all connections from outside the Benelux.

Connection logging

All connections and streams that arrive on the Combell Shield platform are logged and checked by smart algorithms. This way, we can quickly see when one IP address suddenly sends a suspicious number of requests to multiple devices or applications.

When the algorithms notice that unsafe activities are happening from a certain IP address, we block that abusive address and all our customers remain safe.

Web Application Firewall

Of course, our firewall is also a very important part of Combell Shield. When a hacker enters certain data in a web form, he can use them to confuse a database. This is called an SQL injection attack. With the Web Application Firewall, we quickly detect these attacks, and we can immediately block the hacker.

Our Firewall also intervenes against brute-force attacks. This is an attack in which a hacker continuously tries to log in to a website or webshop and tries out various combinations of login data in order to get into the system.

Our firewalls keep digital intruders out, but also when someone tries to tamper with our managed servers, Combell Shield comes into action. Because our shield also consists of people. Security experts, to be precise, who keep a close eye on our data center.

Our own night club bouncer

Just like in a nightclub where you have an bouncer at the door, there is a GateKeeper at the entrance of our Combell Shield. This way, your web server no longer has to fight off attacks itself, and its computing power can be used in full for the performance of your website.

If a request does not appear to be kosher, it does not stand a chance of getting past Combell Shield. Suspicious requests do not get near the server where your website is located. 😉

Individual updates

Regular updates of all systems are an important security mechanism in Combell Shield. When Content Management Systems (CMSs) such as WordPress or Drupal do not receive updates, they are very vulnerable to zero-day attacks. Zero-day attacks are attacks in which a hacker immediately exploits a software problem, even before an update can be performed to fix that problem.

How do you install Combell Shield?

We can answer this question briefly. 😉 Combell Shield is not an option or part of a package. Every Combell customer who uses our hosting can, by default, count on the security of our rock-solid digital shield. And this without any additional cost. So, for free!

Choosing hosting with Combell

Buying a hosting package from Combell, that is:

• Using the most reliable hosting in Belgium.
• Rely on expertise since 1999.
• Free support day and night, in your own language.
• Free domain name the first year.
• ...

And on top of that, our ultra-secure Combell Shield comes as standard! Knights also have a shield, but they often have to go on quests. Not you. Because here at Combell, you're just where you need to be. 😀 We get you online with ease and in the best conditions.

Frequently asked questions about Combell Shield