I have a new website project I want to launch and I want to use Nigeria Hosting company. My fear is, wouldn't they (Hosting Company) extract my entire files and Database and come up with similar project over time?

Please Web Guru kindly advise and share your experience and thought. I want to know if these Hosting Companies don't know such

Yes they can, infact their tech support will steal all your source code, it's on their server so they can be mischievous and temper with your application.

It happened to me before, in short instead of copy and paste my code, dey cut it and pasted and the application was not working. When I confronted the support, the denied as expected.

IT business is becoming crazy & dirty by the day, ideas or projects are being ripped off & rebranded..ha ha ha

The best hosting would be cloud hosting with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or Oracle Cloud

chim14:
Yes they can, infact their tech support will steal all your source code, it's on their server so they can be mischievous and temper with your application.

It happened to me before, in short instead of copy and paste my code, dey cut it and pasted and the application was not working. When I confronted the support, the denied as expected.

IT business is becoming crazy & dirty by the day, ideas or projects are being ripped off & rebranded..ha ha ha

The best hosting would be cloud hosting with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or Oracle Cloud

wow, that's really bad. I will pick one of the above you mentioned

Try to obfuscate your application before hosting it with your hosting provider this will make it difficult for them to just copy and use your application.

Hosting with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or Oracle Cloud can be very expensive and many businesses are moving back to hosting their application themselves as they have found the cost to be too high.

You mean it's possible for me to secure/lock(obfuscate) my web app that will make my Files/database to be extracted by these Hosting Companies?

No need to be worried about your db unless you are using SQLite as all main db requires password and you can even go a step further by carefully sharing rights for the database users.

About the files, that will be tricky or impossible cause uploading compiled files can even be decompiled back to the normal plaintext so to have a rest of mind just steer clear from these hosts.

Google cloud offers a full year free hosting, Azure does too, am not sure about AWS. Depending on the language used for the website other cheap alternatives might exist like PythonAnywhere for Django, HostGator for NodeJs e.t.c

Shepherdd:

About the files, that will be tricky or impossible cause uploading compiled files can even be decompiled back to the normal plaintext so to have a rest of mind just steer clear from these hosts.

Obfuscation and compiled files are not the same, you need to learn about them. Obfuscation locks the application with a key after compliling it to make it very difficult for someone else to unlock and use your application.

When an application is compiled it just makes the application to load quicker as the compilation has aready been done.

.

MrBible:


Obfuscation and compiled files are not the same, you need to learn about them. Obfuscation locks the application with a key after compliling it to make it very difficult for someone else to unlock and use your application.

When an application is compiled it just makes the application to load quicker as the compilation has aready been done.

Glad you said very difficult which means not impossible. Everything is possible what matters is the motivation behind it.

There are tools like JSNice and JSBeautify that de-obfuscate JS files, I have used them personally to de-obfuscate some critical part of code I obfuscated (I lost the original code). And there are many more de-obfuscator for other languages. I have even seen an obfuscated Java bytecode .class file converted back to a .java source file.

Although their output will differ from the original in stuffs like variable names, but I assure you the code is 100% functionally correct and to a skilled serious person, reverse engineering this is doable.

Using multiple shared hosting with obfuscation and a distributed application is still the most cost effective way to go unless you are a big company that can afford the cost of cloud hosting for business.
Though if you just want to use it for learing to programme then a basic cloud hosting package is fine but it can be very slow when using a basic package.

Shepherdd:


Glad you said very difficult which means not impossible. Everything is possible what matters is the motivation behind it.

There are tools like JSNice and JSBeautify that de-obfuscate JS files, I have used them personally to de-obfuscate some critical part of code I obfuscated (I lost the original code). And there are many more de-obfuscator for other languages. I have even seen an obfuscated Java bytecode .class file converted back to a .java source file.

Although their output will differ from the original in stuffs like variable names, but I assure you the code is 100% functionally correct and to a skilled serious person, reverse engineering this is doable.