Strong & reliable infrastructure
Server hosting
The website and its database (glossaries, jobs, clients, ...) are hosted by a US based company called Heroku.
650 7th Street
San Francisco, CA
94103
Heroku's contact informationHeroku is state of the art for web hosting, it's a really popular, high quality hosting solution among IT professionals, startups, etc.
It's more expensive than most server hosting companies but it's taking care of much of the server administration and lets us focus on writing good software.
Heroku operates on top of Amazon AWS. (More about Amazon AWS below)
Although Amazon has datacenters on different continents, we chose to host the data in the US because we thought we would have more users in North America and it's good practise to have the data closer to your users.
What is Amazon AWS?
AWS stands for "Amazon Web Services", and yes, it is the same company as the book seller.
Amazon is even bigger at providing computing and storage capacity for IT professionals (I insist on “professionals") than it is at selling books.
Don't try to host your personal website there, you will need a degree in IT engineering to succeed.
Amazon is the largest cloud hosting provider in the world. Market researcher Gartner said in May 2015 that AWS has more cloud capacity in use than its next 14 competitors combined. (Those include Google, Microsoft, etc.)
In fact, most of the big online services that you use on a daily basis operate on top of Amazon AWS EC2 and S3, because there is no other server provider that offers that quality of service.
Other examples of companies/organizations using AWS are: Apple, Spotify, Netflix, Airbnb, Yelp, Pinterest, Pfizer, Unilever, Dow Jones, Siemens, NASA, ...
The goal of Amazon AWS is to sell computing and storage capacity to companies. It is not in the business of collecting personal data and selling ads like Google for example. If you host your data on Google Drive, you might have robots analyzing your files so that they can show you more relevant ads.
This is not the case for Amazon AWS.
For the quality of service, Amazon beats everyone, we just can't get this level of quality+security anywhere else.
Secure cloud storage
Amazon provides the best possible Cloud service with the highest security.
It has the lowest risk possible of data loss in case of material breakdown. You can learn more on how they handle security here.
All the files you upload on Interpreters' Help are stored encrypted.
- Imported glossary files
- Jobs/clients material files
- Profile photos
- File uploaded in the file storage section
Data in Interpreters' Help's database (ex: glossaries' entries, jobs, clients, etc.) are also encrypted at rest.
Doing so, allows Interpreters' Help to comply with the most stringent security requirements. In the exceedingly unlikely event of a physical breach of our underlying infrastructure (i.e., if someone broke into the datacenter and removed the disk drives), your data would remain safe and secure.
Since version 2 of the site (January 2015), as recommended by Edward Snowden, we have enabled HTTPS (SSL) to encrypt ALL data that transit to and from the website.
It means that when you are using Interpreters' Help on a public Wifi network, if someone steals the data that transit on the network, Interpreters’ Help's data will be encrypted and unusable by a hacker.
This is also true when BoothMate synchronizes the glossaries to your local computer or tablet.
This simple fact makes requests on Interpreters' Help more secure than the majority of websites out there that only encrypt billing transactions.
Similarly, all the connections with the different databases are encrypted using SSL.
To access your account on the website, you define a password when you register.
Passwords are stored encrypted in the database with the Bcrypt algorithm, there is no way for us to guess or decrypt them.
Daily backup
We backup the site's database (glossaries, jobs, clients, ...) on a daily basis, on redundant storage, on different remote sites using SSL.
Backups are also stored encrypted.
Credit card information
Your credit/debit card information never hits our servers, it goes directly to Stripe, the payment gateway that handles payments for us.
We do not store your complete credit/debit card information at any time, nor do we have sight of any credit/debit card details that you enter when paying for our Services.
On subscription's creation and update, Stripe sends us information like your payment card's brand/last four digits and expiration date that we store for receipt generation.
Stripe is a globally respected payment gateway.
Interpreters' Help complies 100% with all PCI regulations, rules and recommendations.
Confidentiality
You are in control of what you share.
We do our best to inform you, close to the share buttons, about what will be seen by those with whom you are sharing.
Interpreters' Help's members have a profile that can only be seen by members of the site. You are in control of the data you put in this profile. We do not sell or share this data with any third party.
What are the limitations of Interpreters' Help's data protection efforts?
- While we are committed do everything in our power to protect our members' data and to resist requests from law enforcement, we also think it’s important to be transparent about our limitations. We may ultimately be required by law to comply with a valid court order. We can’t speculate on what future scenarios might bring rise to such disclosures, but we will notify the affected individual(s) through the contact information they have provided to us in advance of any disclosure to law enforcement, unless doing so would violate the law or a court order.
- The security measures that we put in place only work if you use a strong password for your account and keep it confidential. It is important not to share any passwords with anyone.
