Congratulations, you have your own dedicated web server! Now all you have to do is secure it against the attack of thousands of would-be hackers so that all of your hard work doesn’t go to waste. Following simple tips and guides, the process won’t be too stressing for you.

Any time you give someone access to your dedicated server, you are allowing one more way into your secure information. Even if the person is trusted, things such as social engineering can pry passwords away from someone quite surprisingly. Essentially you want to limit anyone who has access to not only your server, but to any serve your server offers to others.

A server straight out of the box will be near useless to you. If you want to provide your back end and the front end functionality, you will have to install modules. Modules are small scripts and programs that allow you to do things such as use a language or program to run your server. Update are frequent, and should be downloaded to avoid certain security risks.

Although you won’t ever run into a security concern coding in straight HTML, as soon as you turn to another language, the odds are you will face security concerns. In the right hands, every language can do something drastic and harmful if it has access to the back end of the server. An example would be with Ruby on Rails, which works closely with MySQL, which can easily be manipulated to delete an entire database in seconds.

Go through every module that your server runs. If you don’t use it, or don’t think you will use it in the future, it’s best to remove it. Always check your research to see whether or not the module you are viewing is necessary for your server to operate. Doing this will ensure that a user won’t make use of a security exploit in a module you aren’t monitoring, and thus don’t have a patch for due to the lack of attention paid to the module.

Server administrators always make backups from time to time. And this just isn’t because of bad users that want to ruin your server for fun- it’s because sometimes there are bugs in code, accidents, and other odd happenings that can’t be explained. If solutions don’t seem to work out, having a back up is always something that can be done as a last resort- and they are easy to do as well.

Closing Comments

Odds are that your web host will have a guide for you, or a server already secured once you purchase it. Take advantage of the generosity of these web hosts and read up all you can on security tactics. It could save your website, your hobby, and even your financial stability if you are a professional webmaster.

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