How Effective Is Malware Scanning by Hosts?

It really all depends on how competent the host is. The have direct access to all of your files, so when compared to third-party services, they have much better access to find and fix things, but the question really is how competent are they at it?

If you trust your host’s competency in other fields, it’s probably worth trusting them in the field of malware scanning too.

That’s the problem — I can’t personally assess the host without using them for years. I don’t have the extensive knowledge or means to verify the claims some of them make about their security. It’s very difficult to search on anything related to web hosting and get reliable reviews.

Are their prices decent? How are their reviews in general (you may need to search to find them)?

How do they stack up against the prices and reviews of add-on malware scanning services like https://sucuri.net/ and https://vaultpress.com/ ?

Many hosts have really crappy malware scanning, some have very good ones. It just depends. In many instances they leverage third-party providers and pass the scanning off the end-user.

Also understand that there are different types of scanning. Most hosts, if not all, are mostly interested in server level scans, not application scans and those that do application scans do a very bad job.

Take care

In the interest of full disclosure I run a scanning service so you might just ignore my feedback as nonsense. I also happen to partner and work with hosts a lot, which is where my feedback comes from. Do with it as you will.