As a Webmaster, how are you handling the response to the war in Ukraine in regards to managing your site(s)?

Question

This is a community wiki intended for our users to be able to share ideas as to how Webmasters are managing the response to the war in Ukraine for their site(s). There are no right or wrong answers, nor reputation points conferred, so feel free to add answers or edit to improve them.

In response to the war in Ukraine, many companies and financial institutions are restricting their services and products in Russia. Consequently, this is impacting sites around the world in terms of the services & products they provide and the payment sources available to them. For example, NameCheap announced they will no longer be providing services to users registered in Russia. GoDaddy similarly announced that it's no longer offering .ru domains, Russian language versions of their site, or the Ruble as payment. And there are many other examples in related industries…

Visa and Mastercard stated they were suspending operations in Russia and would be ceasing all transactions there. American Express joined the boycott and included Belarus as well. Additionally, Russian banks have been sanctioned and blocked from using SWIFT. Therefore payments from/to customers, clients, and providers might be impacted if located there.

Last but not least, cybersecurity is a growing concern for many sites given the potential increase in risk for attacks.

As a Webmaster, how are you managing the response on the site(s) that you manage? Do you have a checklist or some ideas that you can share in regards to things to consider (e.g., like notifying users & customers about changes to terms, steps to secure your site, etc…)? In short, what do you think as Webmasters that we should be aware of or preparing for when it comes to managing our site(s) during this globally-impacting conflict?

Answer 1

Here's what I'd recommend (feel free to edit this):

• Review the services & products that your site(s) provide to see if they rely on a third-party vendor that's boycotting Russia and Belarus. For example, if you're a webhost using a control panel (e.g., cPanel, Plesk, etc…) that provides domains registrations through GoDaddy, then registrations for .ru and payments using the Ruble won't be available (refer to the GoDaddy announcement in the question).

• Update the Terms of Service (TOS) for your site(s) to include suspensions/discontinuation of service to users/customers in the boycotted countries, as well as the payment sources that may not be available to them (refer to the Visa/Mastercard/American Express statements in the question above).

• Do a user/customer search based on country to see if any are located in the boycotted countries and then send them a notification by email as to the changes to your TOS.

• Decide if posting a banner on your site is warranted to notify users/customers of the update to your TOS.

• Review the security for your site to make sure you have protection against: DDoS attacks, malware, phishing schemes, and ransomware. Securing websites is a large topic, but a good start is to implement a CDN that will protect your site from front-end attacks, having a backup to restore from, and using secure passwords.