Website Firewall & Security Setup
Website security is always concerned as long as your site is online. You never expect your website offline when an important transaction being made there or you when you like to show products to clients from live store. Indeed, a website failure could lose a big business sometimes so it's necessary for every webmaster to learn some basic knowledges to secure your site and keep it in healthy state.
There's a lot of work to do for website securing, for example the server site security configuration, network firewall, unhealthy traffic filtering etc. In this article I will mainly focus on website coding level about how to save the limited bandwidth and avoid malicious injection. The two parts security would be mostly discussed on various community web forums.
How to secure your website code to deal with attack?
Website code is the basis of your website and it's the first thing you need pay attention to for website security. You should always follow the two tips below for code level protecting
Optimize your website codes as simple as possible. We should always try to strip out the unnecessary codes in programming and keep our codes as standard as possible. It's not only good for security but also good for website loading and speed. A good website structure is always friendly to both search engine and visitors.
Encrypt your important codes. If your website contains some important commercial info you should try to encrypt it using up to date technologies. Nowadays most websites are database driven, database connection strings should be protected mostly since it stores all your website sensitive information. The best way is to encrypt each of your connection strings and put your sql queries in stored procedures to reduce any potential security hole.
Of course, there're many more to be considered to protect your website data, you should always keep updated to industry news and improve your skills.
How to save website bandwidth from hotlinking?
One popular website hacking is called dDos which is to exhaust your website bandwidth and cause entire server down. Although we may not have access to configure the hardware level protecting, we can also do something in coding to reduce extra bandwidth consumption. Here I would like to show how to avoid image hotlinking from other websites. hotlinking would seriously eat your website bandwidth especially when there're many pictures on your website. Take wordpress for example, we can implemen the following codes to htaccess and upload it to your website root.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !yourwebsite.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !bing.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !yahoo.com [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|png|jpg)$ http://yourwebsite.com/no.png [R,NC,L]
Make sure to replace yourwebsite.com to your actual domain and make sure your hosting server support htaccess. Once you configured it properly, any hotlinked picture from your website will be replaced by the file no.png, you can put anything on this picture and notify visitor it's linking from your website.
Firewall for WordPress Site
Wordpress is definitely one of the most famous website software nowadays. Here I would like to introduce a firewall that's designed specially for wordpress. It's approved to be working as the best. For how to setup the firewall, please visit this official site for details http://perishablepress.com/5g-firewall-beta/
There're many plugins/codes for wordpress security configuration. However, no matter how you security the site, please keep in mind you should always backup your data regularly in case of any hacking or damage.
Any other tips to secure your website?
Of course, no matter what kind of effort you have made to security your website you will finally find a hosting to put your site online. That means the rest works completely rely on your hosting provider, thus a quality web hosting provider is quite important to put your website in safe hand. When you consider a hosting provider, never be misguided by their cheap service, you should pay attention to the service feedbacks. You always get what you paid for, each penny will return the same value service.
Best Secure web hosting suggestion
If you're looking for secure web hosting service with leading features and affordable price, I highly recommend you check out Arvixe. No matter if you need windows or linux web hosting plan, arvixe got it setup with industry standard features plus outstanding security implementations. Host your website on arvixe server is to put your business in safe hand!
The Arvixe multiple SAS 70 Type II certified data centers located in Dallas and Houston, they deliver complete redundancy in supplying data center power to servers and heating, ventilation and air conditioning.
If any data center received a power disruption for any reason, you're covered. That's because arvixe has a complete power management system, including backup generators, in the unlikely event that normal power supplies fail.
Visit http://www.Arvixe.com for secure web hosting plans
