WA hosting Updates [Malware, Plesk, WordPress]

Hi WA!
Congratulations, your website is malware free! All websites have been cleaned of malicious code placed there by various hacking attempts that are taking place on the web right now.

WA Hosting is Safe

We have spent the last 10 days upgrading our security and configurations across the WA hosting network to first ensure that hackers cannot get in through Wordpress plugins or themes. This took quite a while for us to fix because we first had to determine how these plugins and themes were being attacked.

Securing the Network Infrastructure

There are many things that a hosting company can do to be secure, usually the more secure you are, the less functionality you can offer your clients. With WordPress we had our hands tied because we needed to allow WA members the same wordpress freedom that they expect to have. Adding new themes, plugins, modifying your styles, etc. This required some tricky configurations to keep the network secure, but we nailed it!

Known Security Holes - Plesk Control Panel

While we were hardening security on our servers we noticed some glaring holes in Plesk. Kyle and I were forced with a decision to make. Allow members to still access Plesk but leave some vulnerabilities open (known issues with Plesk). Or close plesk to provide a much more secure network. We chose safety of course.

No Plesk Control Panel?

Plesk control panel is still disabled - it’s something we’ve been planning for a number of years actually. What we will be replacing it with is a much easier solution to:
1 - Manage email addresses
2 - Manage Domain forwards
3 - Manage Databases
4 - Manage Backups
My Question has always been: What is Plesk really good for? There is really zero reason to log into plesk once you can do the above 4 points. In the very near future we will be rolling out this functionality so that plesk can be removed entirely. If you need to access your website files, do so via FTP using an FTP client (CoreFtp is free and it's great)
Setting up email addresses will take 2 seconds in the coming days when we release our new functionality on your WA Hosting dashboard. Forwarding domains will be next, followed by the ability to easily manage your Database using a solution like Phpmyadmin, or create a database.
Backups are also going to be made easy so that you can back up your entire website, database + files with the click of a button at any time.
These are the planned updates that are coming and we will be releasing them as soon as possible.

Upgrades to WordPress

We've upgraded wordpress within the WordPress Express website builder so that anyone that builds a new website at WA will have the latest version of WordPress installed.
We know that at WA we offer the easiest solution to building websites and in the coming weeks we’re going to be adding to this with some great new updates and features for all who want to build websites without the hassle of the clunky installers that you find on ALL other web hosts.
Please let us know if you have any questions and I’ll be happy to answer them for you.
Carson