This blog was written by A. Saber Shenouda, CTO of PlanetHoster
PlanetHoster’s mission is to provide the latest technologies and technical expertise in an all-in-one premium web hosting platform. We serve more than 60,000 customers using our HybridCloud infrastructure, and proudly host more than 100,000 websites in North America and Europe. It goes without saying that the safety and security of our customers is of the utmost importance to us, and to maximize that protection we launched a private bug bounty program through the Bugcrowd platform. Today we’re taking that program public to maximize exposure and take advantage of the diversity of Bugcrowd’s global Crowd of researchers.
For companies relying on PlanetHoster to support their websites, our uptime is mission-critical for their business. It’s absolutely vital to the ecosystem that we thwart incoming attacks and minimize downtime as much as possible.
When we began our search for a managed bug bounty program we had one thing in mind – protecting our customers. We wanted a solution that we could count on to sniff out the holes, help them get fixed immediately, and assist in future security. Within two minutes of launching our bug bounty program with Bugcrowd, we had researchers submitting valid vulnerabilities. That instant feedback was exactly what we were hoping for, and we knew we’d made the right choice.
Everyday we receive multiple threats from DDoS to phishing to bruteforce attacks, and we have to be proactive in continuously make sure all our servers are up-to-date and secure. Bugcrowd makes it easy for us by taking the complexities of managing a bug bounty program off our hands and managing it in-house. Bugcrowd provides a formalized and seamless process with their community of researchers and experts through their platform to ensure maximum efficacy. Not only do we receive immediate notice of vulnerabilities, but Bugcrowd goes the extra mile in sharing remediation advice to fix them.
Security has always been top of mind, but as we scaled rapidly, our previous strategy of combining a quality assurance engineer with automated tools such as Burp, needed the extra support of an outside Crowd. Bugcrowd’s team of experienced security experts manages that program for us, lifting a great burden off of our shoulders, and allowing us to focus on providing premium services. We’ll always be concerned with the safety of our customers, but with a partner like Bugcrowd, we know there’s another line of defense that has our back.
