If your website is hosted with us, you should have little to fear from the epic Meltdown and Spectre bugs that surfaced recently. In case you haven’t heard, these two exploits are among the scariest ever, in part because they affect essentially every computer or device made since 1995. That’s the bad news. The good news is that these bugs are extremely difficult or impossible to exploit remotely. They mainly affect “the cloud” and other shared hosting environments, where multiple, mutually distrustful users share a single processor. Here, a bad actor could sniff passwords and other sensitive information on an unpatched system. Sadly, that is by far the most common way that websites are hosted today — on shared hosting environments. However, it is NOT how we do it. We run our own, exclusive physical hardware server located in a highly secured data center connected to multiple Tier 1 backbones and backed up by a sophisticated emergency backup system. No one but us has access to this system, other than through typical browser-based, well sand-boxed admin panels. Meltdown and Spectre appear to be almost impossible to exploit remotely, and that is good news for us, and our clients, too.
