SiteLock Reviews Beach Rental Property After Cyberattack [Case Study]

Company Overview

Rentals on the Ocean manages twelve beautiful oceanfront and ocean view cottages in Nags Head, North Carolina. Reservationist and website manager, Ronni Moldovan, confidently states, “you will never want to leave our beaches.” Founded in 1995, Rentals on the Ocean prides itself in being “Always Pet Friendly.”

As a way to make booking reservations easier for their visitors, change was needed to accommodate their high volume of tourists. Rentals on the Ocean shifted from local advertising on third-party vacation rental websites to creating a website of its own. It quickly took off, and the website reached customers across the nation. Today, Rentals on the Ocean relies heavily on rentalsontheocean.com to book vacation rentals and help customers plan their vacations.

The Challenge

Shortly after the launch of rentalsontheocean.com, it crashed. When Ronni went to view the website, she found it had been suspended by her hosting provider, meaning it was taken offline and could not be accessed. Ronni’s web host informed her that rentalsontheocean.com experienced a cyberattack and was infected with malware. Ronni recalls, “It was an overwhelming experience. During the time the website was down, rental bookings significantly decreased. Our customers had to call to book a reservation the old fashion way: pen and paper.” Her hosting provider recommended SiteLock to remove the malware and get rentalsontheocean.com up and running as quickly as possible. Ronni immediately reached out to a SiteLock Website Security Consultant who “immediately recognized the problem within minutes of calling,” says Ronni.

The Resolution

SiteLock reviewed the company’s needs and recommended the appropriate security solution for rentalsontheocean.com: SiteLock® INFINITY™. INFINITY is a website scanner that continuously monitors rentalsontheocean.com for malware, and automatically removes any found. By the time SiteLock® INFINITY™ completed its first scan of rentalsontheocean.com, it had detected and removed multiple files of malware that were damaging the site. The SiteLock Expert Services team, a highly trained group of security engineers, is an exclusive perk of INFINITY. The team helped to manually removed one additional complex file of malware that was too sophisticated to be removed automatically. Ronni recalls, “The website was up and running within three hours of calling SiteLock.” Rentals on the Ocean also implemented SiteLock® TrueShield™ WAF (web application firewall) to proactively prevent malicious traffic and harmful request from accessing rentalsontheocean.com. “Because of SiteLock, I do not have to monitor the website for security issues or wonder if another cyberattack will happen. SiteLock reviews my site for me. With the problems SiteLock has solved, I now only have to update my content, and the best part is, our traffic has increased by 50 percent.”

Since implementation, SiteLock® INFINITY™ continuously scans a substantial 7,117 files for malware on rentalsontheocean.com, and SiteLock® TrueShield™ WAF blocks a whopping 5,000 bots daily from accessing her website.

“We love SiteLock! Since having SiteLock, we have not experienced any security concerns,” says Ronni. When asked if she had any advice for other website owners without website security, she simply stated, “You should have SiteLock review your website ASAP if you want to protect your business and your customers. It’s better to be safe than sorry.” When Ronni recalls the experience of a cyberattack, she explains, “Before we had SiteLock, it felt as if we were in a sinking ship in the middle of the ocean. Now, we are smooth sailing across the ocean with no strong winds or storms.”

SiteLock offers a suite of comprehensive and affordable website security solutions to ensure your website is protected from cyberattacks. For more SiteLock case studies, visit www.sitelock.com/reviews. You can also read other SiteLock customer reviews on Consumer Affairs and TrustPilot.