Secure Webhosting

The safety of web applications is important for organisations. Online information should always be correct and only accessible by the right users. Integrity, availability, and confidentiality are the three pillars of information security. Acknowledge Secure Webhosting effectively responds to these pillars.

Acknowledge’s Secure Webhosting is a modern and secure hosting environment that always meets the most essential security measures, so your organisation can meet the IT security guidelines for web applications from the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre and Amazon Marketplace’s Data Protection Policy.

Is Secure Webhosting the right solution for your organisation?

We offer Acknowledge Secure Webhosting to organisations that want to process personal data on a large scale through public websites or web applications. A lot of healthcare organisations process special categories of personal data through general healthcare websites: contact form that a visitor can use to fill in their medical history, an appointment form for an STD outpatient clinic, or a form used by referral health professionals that contains patient data. With Secure Webhosting, healthcare organisations handle personal data carefully. (Semi) public bodies that want to meet the requirements from NCSC or Informatiebeveiligingsdienst voor Gemeenten (IBD) benefit from safe webhosting. We also often use these services for webshops that need to meet the GDPR or the requirements of a sector organisation or marketplace.

Security and efficiency

A reliable webhosting platform ensures that you can meet the technical security requirements. We always try to balance security and efficiency. The security shouldn’t be at the expense of the web developers’ or end user’s productivity. Secure Webhosting focusses on the hosting environment and the (integrated) security measures and systems. The software consists of hundreds of virtual machines (VMs) that focus on physical servers in our data centres in the Netherlands. Secure Webhosting’s operating system is Linux. Therefore, the platform can be used by over 90 percent of common web applications.

The hosting environment

Acknowledge Secure Webhosting is convenient for web developers. From now on they can roll out the latest version of a web application in one click, often without downtime. We offer a Control Panel for web developers with functions for deployments, the accessibility of the production, and acceptance environment, settings for specific HTTP headers, log analysis, and reports. All of our web applications also contain a production environment and an acceptance environment, so newly built functionalities and performances can be checked, preventing nuisance for the live environment. Secure Webhosting also offers a standard configuration for several types of applications (such as WordPress, PHP/Laravel, Magento, Drupal, Node.JS and Java/Tomcat).

Joep Seuren Security consultant

Security measures and systems

Our Secure Webhosting platform uses a several important security measures and systems:

• Network and web application firewalls
• Load balancing using SSL off-loading
• Let’s Encrypt certificates and supports installing your own certificates
• Outbound Secure Email Gateway (among others DKIM, TLS, DANE and spam detection)
• Security Incident and Event Management system
• Central storage for application and server log files
• Intrusion Detection System
• Secure hosting that includes vulnerability scanning, antivirus, and antimalware scanning
• Use our proactive monitoring tool to monitor dozens of performance indicators
• Back ups based on a fixed schedule and encrypted (saved off site)
• Restricted paths per type application (for example only for specific IP addresses)

Acknowledge Secure Webhosting

Acknowledge’s Secure Webhosting is a Software as a Service that we offer as a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Our managed hosting platform is competitively priced and offers a 24/7 standby service outside of office hours. The webservers are doubled and databases and media files are saved on different platforms (not on the webservers). If one server goes down, the platform will still be functional. Whenever a new release is rolled out, new webservers are automatically built with up-to-date versions of the operating system and software. If supported by the platform, the old webservers will be replaced by the new server one by one. As a result, this prevents downtime when a release is rolled out. In addition, all Secure Webhosting’s servers have an age limit of hundred days. This means that a server always refreshes in hundred days, even when no release is planned during those days.