As soon as you purchase your dedicated server, you should start looking into methods of securing it and browsing any security policies already put into place. You wouldn’t want someone to erase your pride and joy in life, so doing so is important even despite the lack of fun it may be.
Your security plan starts right away. Don’t lose any time in determining who you want to give direct access to your server, and who shouldn’t have access at all. Next determine how users of your web site will need to access your server. Allow and deny permissions to files and directories to correspond with the rights you want them to have- whether it be to read, write, modify, or execute files.
Stay up to date on your modules that you load onto the server. An example would be with the PHP module that allows a server to run PHP code. Every so often, there will be security exploits found out that are solved through a new release of the module. By staying up to date on patches, you will avoid the destruction of your server through careless administration.
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.
It’s not always about what you have on your server, but rather what you don’t have. It’s good practice to delete any modules you aren’t using, and to close all ports you are sure that you will not be using in the future. The reasoning behind this is that if you have a spare module you don’t pay attention to, a user could take advantage of your lack of awareness and take advantage of a security exploit in an older version of the module.
If all else fails, you should always have a backup to rely on. A backup should be made periodically so that if something does happen, you always have a method of getting all of your files back. This is especially important for databases, which can easily become corrupt even without outside interference. Some servers even come with a separate storage disk solely for such recovery backups.
Final Thoughts
Web hosting is a business that requires attention to detail. You can tackle your security problems by updating all your modules, cutting those you don’t use, and carefully programming your website to be free of bugs. Nothing is 100% secure, so also make use of backups in the case of an accident.
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