For a website initially created to be just an experiment, it’s a pretty big deal to hit two major milestones, though it didn’t happen overnight. List25 features daily posts compiled with lesser-known intriguing information ranging from the bizarre to subjects like politics, travel, history, science, and more. It now has over 2 million subscribers on YouTube and 430 thousand Likes on Facebook.
Founder Syed Balkhi has learned a lot of lessons building List25 and his other websites, like WPBeginner – all from the ground up. In January 2012 , when List25 first launched, Syed considered himself a newbie to generating revenue in these top social media platforms, but by 2014, the site had inched its way to being among the Top 1% Of YouTube’s “Google Preferred” channels for advertisers.
The Key To Success is Automation
In the beginning, with limited resources, Syed focused on platforms that brought the most traffic. He also enlisted Sucuri to aid in monitoring his websites.
We had monitoring running on our site and it helped us harden the site. It would report anytime a vulnerability was found or something suspicious was found.
The number one way that site owners draw bad actors to their website is by having outdated software and too many plugins or extensions. Even with restraint, it’s not easy to manage it all – especially as List25 grew in popularity. In conjunction, the threat to the website’s security grew. Attacks were happening 1-2 times a day.
I have several different businesses running and having to pay attention to the server side of things on List25 (which is not my specialty as I am a business owner, not a system admin). I needed a team and a product like the firewall Sucuri offers, which automatically blocks anything malicious. Because of the popularity of List25.com, we cannot afford the site to go down. We changed hosting providers and then turned on the Sucuri Web Application Firewall layer that sits on top at the DNS level.
Measurable Benefits
By adding the Sucuri Website Application Firewall (WAF), within the first 30 days more than 40,000 malicious requests had been blocked.
It is super, super secure. Since I’ve done that I haven’t needed to log into my server because I haven’t had any issues. Before using Sucuri I had to mitigate these attacks myself, but now that I’m using Sucuri I don’t have to do any of that and that is a big stress reliever for me.
For more information on how we provide complete website security for our clients, visit our website and chat with our Customer Happiness Team today.
Read the full List25 Case Study
We provide our services to many website owners interested in improving pagespeed and blocking website hacks.
If you would like to be featured as our next customer case study, email us at marketing@sucuri.net
For more information on website security for your agency, please visit us at sucuri.net or chat with our Customer Happiness Team.
Bruno Zanelato
Juliana Lewis
Rafael Capovilla
Estevao Avillez
Rianna MacLeod
Alycia Mitchell
Daniel Cid
Victor Santoyo