Many thanks to Gurpreet Singh, Founder at Pixpa for joining Safety Detectives and giving us the opportunity to learn more about Pixpa’s website builder and how they keep high security standards for their clientele.
What is Pixpa and what motivated you to start?
Pixpa is an easy and affordable website builder for creators and small businesses. It started as just a portfolio website builder for photographers, artists and designers. However, over the last few years, Pixpa has grown to become an all-in-one platform for building your website, online store and blogs. Pixpa also offers Client Galleries which are especially useful for photographers to share, proof, sell and deliver their images to clients.
It all started almost 10 years ago. Back then I was running a full-service creative agency. I had a lot of friends who were photographers, designers, architects and other creators. They would always seek my help to put their portfolio online. Even as an agency, we were always showcasing our work online for clients, and there was no easy and affordable way of achieving that without knowing a little bit of coding and probably using WordPress.
We built dozens of portfolio websites for friends, word spread out and it became an important part of our design agency services. Slowly, we began to put that experience into action and started building out a specific product. Pixpa was born.
Can you tell me how Pixpa’s web hosting services take care of your customers’ cybersecurity?
As a SAAS product serving thousands of customers, we definitely take data protection very seriously and have deployed multiple layers of security, backup and disaster recovery mechanisms through our product delivery.
We are constantly improving our application structures to prevent any abuse and also use several third-party systems to constantly monitor and optimise the entire application from a security perspective.
But Pixpa is actually more than just web hosting. What other services do you offer?
Web hosting is definitely the base on which Pixpa’s services are built, but we are not really a website hosting service. At its core, Pixpa is essentially a no-code solution for creators and small businesses to build their website easily without depending on a web designer.
We made it easy for anyone without any coding knowledge to showcase, share, and sell their work online. As a website builder, we empower small creative businesses to build their complete online presence in one place, and help them save both time and money by making everything available to them in one single, seamless platform.
The competition is quite fierce right now around web hosting and sitebuilders. How do you manage to stay ahead of your competition?
There are indeed a lot of DIY site builders and website hosting options out there now. I believe that being customer-centric and constantly evolving is the only way to stay ahead of the customers.
To that end, we are focussed on only the small creative businesses such as photographers, artists, designers, and other creators. For this set of customers, Pixpa’s all-in-one feature set, affordable pricing, 24/7 live chat support and the design aesthetics of the templates have helped us gain traction. All of our growth is driven by organic channels and word-of-mouth referrals.
What do you think are the worst cyber threats now that we’re living through this pandemic?
With the global pandemic, there has been an exponential rise in people working from home, shopping online, and using many more digital services. While there are a lot of good things that have come from this, there are a lot of bad things as well.
One of the most important issues is that cyberattacks have skyrocketed during this period. Cyber criminals have used this pandemic to up their attacks, both in scope and frequency.
Then, the use of phishing and social engineering attacks have increased, and ransomware attacks are at new highs too. All of us need to understand these threats, stay vigilant, and use software tools to protect our devices.
That being said, can you suggest the best ways to secure your online portfolio?
I believe creatives building their online portfolio do not have sufficient knowledge on how to secure their website. My recommendation is to use an established DIY website builder to build your website and leave the nuts and bolts of hosting and security to the platform.
Of course one must follow best practices of using a strong password, using 2-factor authentication and being very vigilant and careful about phishing emails.
What are the cybersecurity trends to look out for in the next few years?
The new trends in cybersecurity are increasingly converging upon mobile devices and IOT. With billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices getting online and connected, that will become a prime target for cybercriminals and device makers would need to to protect their smart devices from attacks.
Ransomware based cyber crimes are also on a rise aided by the anonymous nature of using cryptocurrencies for demanding ransoms.
A lot of businesses have also had to face attacks on their cloud infrastructure, especially with a large percentage of employees working remotely in less-than-ideal environments for their data security. The need for skilled cybersecurity professionals who can prevent these attacks will continue to rise.
Individuals and small businesses are also often the target of phishing attempts by email, voice, text, and third-party applications.
All of us need to be aware of these challenges and safeguard ourselves through the combined use of software tools, multi-factor authentication and taking a lot of care in identifying any phishing scams when accessing our email.