If light of the recent announcement that DreamHost accidently let let a 3rd party access a list of client’s FTP passwords (link), we thought we’d give you some pointers to keeping your website secure.
Most of the ways to keep your website secure are the responsibility of your host. They should have a firewall. On shared and reseller packages, your host will patch the operating system to reduce the threat of exploits or viruses.
You should use strong passwords, long in length and containg alpha-numeric characters. Try avoid words or anything related to you, i.e don’t use date of births/names etc. You should always change your default password.
If you use any software on your website such as a forum you should keep up-to-date with any security patches. Subsribe to the mailing list or RSS feed of the software. Although free software is great, exploits can be found often. The same goes for paid software too - keep up to date.
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