How Much Should you Spend on your Website Security?

How important is it to secure your website? And how much should you spend on it?

Ever wondered if your website is secure? Or do you even need to get secured? Having worked with multiple website owners, I have come to realize that not everybody understands how critical security is, and how it can directly impact the business' balance sheet.
Let us analyze this based on the type of website:

1. Product / Business showcase website
2. Static website with no login, no content and no blogs. Just a simple website to showcase your product. You would not need to spend anything on security as there is no data to be stolen.


2. Content-based websites and blogs
3. Websites that curate content or produce content need to protect themselves from content theft, commonly known as content scraping. Content theft and duplication results in lower SEO ranking and lower traffic on website. Content scraping is prevalent in the Industry, and most of the original content gets stolen at various levels. These websites do need to spend on their security, but to a small extent.


3. Listing Websites
4. These websites have ton of data available for its users. All the travel websites, house and rent listing websites, classifieds and other similar businesses fall under this category. Their main business model requires unique listings. Their competitors are always on a run to get more listings and use web scraping techniques to steal data. They need to spend on getting secured, no matter the cost. Having said that, it actually does not cost much to use a third-party security provider like InfiSecure.


4. Social Websites / Chat and Dating Websites
5. These websites rely on genuine users and genuine chats. Their business goes for a toss when bulk fake profiles are created and fake chats, fake likes, fake comments are produced. Also, their business needs to protect its user data as most of the personal info of users is collected. For these websites, security comes first. No matter how much ever they spend on security, the cost will always be lesser than the server cost of processing bot requests if not protected.


5. E-commerce Websites
6. Websites that list products from multiple product categories and sell them online fall under this category. Security is super essential for them. Some of the common fraud practices in the Industry include price scraping (theft of product price info to beat the competition by competitive pricing techniques), fake accounts and fake product reviews, brute force attacks (account hijacking and carding fraud), listing theft (theft of product info) and form and comment spam. These websites should not mind spending on deploying third-party security products. The cost of protection is zilch compared to the brand it protects.


6. Genuine Data Aggregators
7. The websites that generally compare product features and/or prices get permission from other websites for scraping, to be used for data aggregation purposes. But they themselves are at a risk of getting their aggregated data scraped. They can have multiple competitors setup within days if they do not protect their website. So again, cost for data protection is not a limiting factor for them.

To sum it up, it does not cost much to use web security providers like InfiSecure. Moreover, it reduces the cost of processing the server requests that come from bad bots, which in many cases is more than the fee charged by the web security provider.