Ever heard of spring cleaning during the winter? There’s no better time to do some maintenance and keep an eye on your web hosting account, than the Christmas season. With a string of holidays at your disposal and lots of time to spare, it makes most sense dedicating a bit of this time to keep your website in good health. This article deals with a couple of things that you should do to take care of your hosting account this Christmas. These are things which are often neglected round the year and can help to avoid a major issue in future.

Email filter and forwarders

Every vacation we setup automatic responders to let people know that we are on vacation, but we rarely remove them after we are back. Auto Responders are set to expire automatically after a designated period, however, the auto responder is only deactivated and not deleted. These can pile up and be a nuisance in future. Similarly email forwarders can also accumulate over time and be forgotten even after they are no longer needed. Regularly reviewing these options to ensure will help you to keep your account organized. Since we don’t get time round the year, it’s best to start this season.

Scan your hosting account for malware

Malware and Virus scanning can be a time consuming process which is why most people with large accounts keep putting it off for later. While there maybe nascent threats sitting in your folders, these will never get discovered until you do a full scan of your account. You maybe surprised to note how many infected filed your account was harbouring all the while. All it takes to scan for a virus is the click of a button. Simply start the scan and head out for that Christmas Day lunch. By dinner time you will be presented with a list of threat files and actions to be performed to clean them up.

Take a Backup

Although this should be a weekly task to perform, most of us haven’t even done this in 2 years. It’s time you get down to making your first backup. You will need to clear up some space in your account to accommodate your backup, but once you have enough free space, you can backup everything in a jiffy. Most control panels allow you to perform a full website backup in just 1 step. You don’t need to do any manual file transfer or copy pasting. Might as well get something done over the long break. You will be surprised at how easy it is to get done and will get you into the habit of regularly taking backups.

Upgrade your software

Content Management Systems drive more than half of the World’s websites. Not many people are even aware that a new version of their CMS exists or that they need to urgently upgrade their website software. Keeping your core files, plugins and themes regularly updated is a good practice from the security perspective and even from a continued progress point of view. This Christmas, give your website what it deserves the most - an upgraded Content Management System! Not only will you be securing your site from vulnerabilites, but you will also avoid getting those pesky reminders everytime you login to your system.

Take a look at visitor traffic

Your control panel will usually have your website statistics installed and activated by default. The information will let you see visitor data of the past days and will allow you to know about how your website is being accessed. Visitor stats can also reveal important information and indicate abnormalities in your websites performance. Most statistics software show you a graphical representation of your visitor data. They also show you location and bandwidth consumed by your visitors. Attacks on your website or error pages can be detected by analyzing the patterns of your website statistics. Better to be safe than sorry and it is best to keep an eye out atleast once, if you haven’t done it this year.