Installing Jetpack for WordPress on Winhost

Jetpack is one of the most popular plugins available for WordPress (with over 29 million downloads!), created by Automattic – the same people who made the WordPress app itself. It’s a Swiss Army knife for you site with over a dozen different functions all rolled into one plugin.

It includes essential tools like a website stats, subscriptions, social network sharing and a contact form. It will also hookup with WordPress.com to perform related posts and website uptime monitoring. And it’s free!

If you try to implement Jetpack on Winhost, it won’t work out of the box. By default, we filter requests to the xmlrpc.php file. WordPress.com will try to ping that file during the activation process and it will fail.

One of the reasons we block requests to the xmlrpc.php file is because of an exploit hackers can use to get your WordPress username and password. You can read about the exploit in this excellent Sucuri article.

If you don’t want to bother reading the article, in short, hackers can try thousands of username/password combinations with one request and try to brute force their way into your WordPress site.

But don’t worry, you can still get Jetpack to work by simply overriding our default request filtering. You just have to add this setting in your web.config file:

<configuration>
   <system.webServer>
      <security>
         <requestFiltering>
            <denyUrlSequences>
               <clear />
            </denyUrlSequences>
         </requestFiltering>
      </security>
   </system.webServer>
</configuration>

If you just have a WordPress site on our service, or if you used our App Installer to install WordPress, you might not have a web.config file on your site, so you’ll have to create one. Just follow these instructions:

1. Open the Notepad application (or similar application) on your computer
2. Paste the following into Notepad:
   <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
   <configuration>
   <system.webServer>
   <security>
   <requestFiltering>
   <denyUrlSequences>
   <clear />
   </denyUrlSequences>
   </requestFiltering>
   </security>
   </system.webServer>
   </configuration>
3. Save the file as web.config (not as a .txt file). If using Notepad, click File and Save As. In “Save as type”, select All Files (*.*). In “File name”, enter: web.config
4. Click Save
5. Upload the web.config file to your root folder through FTP

You should now be able to activate the Jetpack plugin. But before you go, there’s the pesky security issue! Your xmlrpc.php file is now susceptible to that security exploit, which may allow hackers to get your username and password. Let’s fix that!

The best way to prevent the xmlrpc.php brute force exploit is to get SiteLock with TrueShield CDN. You will need both SiteLock and TrueShield. TrueShield will block those suspicious requests trying to get your username and password, and protect your site from all sorts of other bad stuff not covered in this article. (If hackers were limited to just one exploit, our jobs would be so much easier!) We highly recommend getting SiteLock and TrueShield. It will block malicious bots, comment spammers, and likely make your site faster, too!

Another solution would be to use Jetpack’s own Protect function. You have Jetpack installed, now use it! Just activate the Protect feature in Jetpack in the Admin panel. The Jetpack team confirmed that it works.

Finally, though perhaps foremost: always use a strong password for your site! Please don’t use qwerty123 or pa$$w0rd.

Actually, do all three – get SiteLock with TrueShield, activated Jetpack Protect, and keep those passwords strong!