Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer science fiction, it’s a real part of our everyday lives. Over the last few years, it’s been adopted across an increasing spectrum of sectors: healthcare, education, security, retail and even HR. It’s also become an important tool in web hosting. In this post, we’ll show you four ways that AI can benefit your website and hosting service.
- Improved security
According to G Data Security, 2017 saw a new malware threat emerge every 4.2 seconds. With over 60% of companies going out of business within 6 months of a cyber attack and with ever increasing compliance requirements, such as GDPR, security is a top priority for business owners.
Artificial intelligence, however, is turning out to be an important tool in helping web hosts respond to cyber threats. The advanced firewall technology they use to protect their clients is able to detect encoded threats and attack patterns as they develop. And with machine learning, every time it faces a new threat, it can incorporate what it has learnt to improve its defences even more and predict future attacks at the earliest possible time. When this happens, it can put effective measures in place and send alerts to both the web hosting team and their clients. - Domain name protection
Domain names are essential to the success of your brand so it is important that any you own are protected and that any others, which could be associated with your company, are not being used in inappropriate or illegal ways.
Whilst there are plenty of domain name checkers you can use to see if a domain is available to purchase, many of these don’t provide 100% accuracy and this has led, in the past, to registration errors.
AI, however, provides another layer of protection. It can be used to track any attempts by others to buy or register a domain that is similar to your own or to use it through a proxy server. This enables you to have constant warnings if rogue traders set up a site selling counterfeit goods or if scammers are cloning your site as a way to defraud individuals out of their money. In this way, it helps protect your business and your online reputation. - Improve domain performance
AI works by understanding patterns in data and coded environments. It analyses them and learns through adding new patterns to its memory. As it learns, AI is able to make predictions and this is one of its key uses within industry.
For those with online businesses, AI can use its predictive intelligence to forecast how well domain names and individual URLs will perform over time. This is done through the analyses of existing web data. This means companies can use AI to research the ideal domain name and extension for their business and get predictions of how well their website might perform in terms of traffic and conversion rates.
Whilst a website’s performance is based on a whole range of factors, such as the nature and the quality of its content, how well it is optimised, and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, etc., companies that have several potential domain names in mind can use this information to help them choose the one which is likely to have the biggest appeal to the market they are targeting. - Self-repairing systems
The maintenance of any digital platform, whether it’s a website or an entire suite of business-critical applications, requires significant input. Today, AI is already at the stage where it can help your IT staff undertake those tasks in more effective and efficient ways.
One example of this is self-repair or self-healing. Hosts that use self-healing artificial intelligence, use it to scan systems, diagnose potential issues and then undertake preventive measures before problems materialise. If, for example, defective hardware is found, a self-healing system can transfer systems running on that hardware to failover servers before the server crashes and thus maintain uptime. Similarly, it can install updates or change settings. In the case of major issues, AI will alert your web host’s IT team to the problem so that human intervention can take place.
Besides providing a more robust service, AI also reduces the maintenance burden on your web host, giving them extra time to improve the performance of your server and giving clients better technical support.
In the future, a combination of robotics and AI could lead to all hardware and system maintenance being carried by machines, with only the minimum of human input. If robots can already build cars, it may only be a matter of time.
Conclusion
Artificial intelligence is likely to be a permanent feature of our lives. It has enormous potential in all kinds of areas and those businesses that do not make use of it are likely to be at a big disadvantage. In web hosting, it provides us with better security, advantageous domain names, and automated maintenance and repair of the systems on which our websites run.
If you are looking for highly secure, state of the art web hosting that takes advantage of self-healing, check out our homepage to see our wide range of hosting services.
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