cPanel Control Panel Security and Password Tips for Web Hosting Accounts

Once you've chosen the best website hosting services company for your website, make sure you follow these tips.

For your continued security and to reduce the chances of being hacked or otherwise compromised we strongly recommend you follow these tips to protect yourself and your web hosting account. Improve your security by updating your passwords, security patches, and account settings on a regular basis.

Below are some basic and advanced tips to help you improve your security.

Basic Tips:

1. Passwords. Strong passwords help protect you and your files.

  • Use a different password for all applications, email accounts, FTP accounts, etc.
  • Do not “reset” your password back to an old one
  • Do not use dictionary-level words for passwords
  • Create a strong password: use a combination of upper and lower-case letters, symbols
    and numbers
  • Always be diligent about protecting your passwords
  • Reset your passwords on a regular basis (good practice is every 90 days)


Advanced Tips:

1. VERY IMPORTANT: Update your software! It is critical that all 3rd party scripts are kept current and up-to-date. This is the greatest security risk and the #1 reason why websites are compromised.

When a company updates their web software it is often to patch a potential security breach, specifically in programs such as WordPress and Joomla. Hackers look for websites with outdated software as they already know what vulnerabilities they can exploit to break into a script or program. To avoid this, ensure you subscribe to your application’s mailing list as, this will provide you with the latest information regarding software updates and vulnerabilities. Although it can be an annoying task, you will be rewarded with better security, and possibly more features and functionality. HostPapa provides an easy way to update your software and stay current - install your software using Fantastico!

2. Keep permissions locked down. Setting the wrong permission on files can be an open invitation for hackers: anyone with user level access can access a file with 777 permission. It is generally good practice to ensure permissions are set to 555 (all read and execute) for directories and 444 (all read) for files, unless a specific program requires them to be set to something different. Avoid using very open permissions such as 777, 755, 666 or 644.

3. Clean up your file manager when possible. This includes deleting pages, scripts, databases, mail boxes, email addresses and FTP accounts that you no longer use, as well as uninstalling software that you no longer need. Removing custom scripts, software and pages that you no longer use helps to limit possible entry points for a hacker and leaves you with fewer pages and scripts to secure.

4. Protect your computer. Protection from malware is just as important as security on your web hosting server. There are specific types of malware and spyware which are designed to download the store passwords from FTP clients such as FileZilla and Dreamweaver, and these details can then be used to upload malicious content to your website. Here are some tips to reduce the possibility of malware being active on your home computer:

  • Install a good Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware package.
  • Complete full scans of your system on a regular basis.
  • Ensure that you are receiving software and definition updates and always check for new updates or versions of your FTP Client.

5. Be careful with using tell-a-friend scripts or submission forms. These scripts are notorious for receiving large amounts of email spam. Many of these scripts act as a gateway for spammers to send unsolicited emails through your website - which will ultimately result in your account with us being suspended or banned.

To prevent this from happening please implement the following:

Use a reputable script with a CAPTCHA phrase. This will place a unique image or phrase on your website, which requires a user to read and enter the characters that they see. This will reduce the possibility of automated software filling out your form, lowering the chance of spammers compromising your website.

cPanel Control Panel Security and Password Tips for Web Hosting Accounts

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Non Indian or Outsourced Web Hosting Customer Technical Support

A Forbes writer went on a bit of a mini-rant today in the blog section of the Forbes website.

The writer, Mark Gibbs, makes some excellent points about the frustrations of dealing with Indian outsourced web hosting support. My favorite quote from the article is:

"And if you’re trying to outsource an IT function such as technical support for anything more complex than a vacuum cleaner, the results are usually, at best, awful, and at worst, a complete disaster."

Gibbs specifically mentions web host EasyCGI who currently outsources their web hosting customer service via India. Gibbs has been a long-standing EasyCGI customer, but is now looking to transfer his websites to another web host. Because, Gibbs says, -

"Should your issues have been something even vaguely technical, it turned out that these support people [EasyCGI's outsourced help] were without a clue; not just knowledgeable but truly clueless."

In honor of Gibbs column, we wanted to answer the question, "What web hosting provider should you use if you don't want outsourced or Indian technical support?"

Here's two web hosts that keep their customer and technical support in-house:

Bluehost technical support is centered near Provo, Utah. My personal experiences with their phone support have been excellent. All the most likely Mormon people that answered the phone just oozed true friendliness and were earnest to the hilt. But best of all, they knew what they were talking about and quickly took care of my issues.

On a recent trip to Park City, I happened to be travelling on I-15 near Provo. Hostgator has a huge billboard on I-15 promoting their open web hosting technical support positions. You know a company is doing technical support the right way when their biggest competitor is actively trying to hire their employees!

Try Bluehost web hosting today.

Bluehost Joomla web hosting

Register.com technical support is located in Yarmouth and Nova Scotia Canada. Just a guess, but Register.com's technical support staff may have the longest tenure in the industry. Register makes an effort to take care of their employees. Plus, there just aren't many other job opportunities, especially technical, in that part of Canada.

The combination of long tenure and good training helped Register.com win the J.D. Powers Award for customer support multiple years running. I don't know of any other web host that's won the J.D. Power Award.

More information in Register.com hosting review.

So if you're looking for top notch, non-Indian technical support from your web host, check out Bluehost or Register.com.

Note: I'm sure there are instances of high-level Indian technical and customer web hosting support in the market place. I just don't know of any hosting company that is a good example of outsourcing technical support to India in a customer friendly manner. Any suggestions?

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Fired SEO Firm Takes Business Owners Website Out of Google Search Results

Unfortunately, disputes happen more often than we'd all like between business owners and their web designers, web hosts, and SEO or other marketing agencies.

We recently wrote a humorous story about a designer that didn't get paid and what he did to the bar website in retaliation for non-payment.

However, most of the time the disputes aren't funny at all. Take this one for example. In the Google webmaster help forums, a business owner had this to say -

"I gave 2 months notice to a SEO company that I was moving my services to another provider. They were obviously not very happy and I was sent an email today saying they have stopped all work and have cancelled the contract immediately. Two hours later I can't find my site in Google, when it was there this morning. This isn't fair as I was indexed before working with them. Can they do this? Could they have de-indexed my site? How can I cancel that request? My business relies on the internet for clients... I am desperate!"

Ouch. That hurts. Perhaps the rouge SEO firm had access to the Google webmaster tools, and tweaked some settings. A change in country designation of the website could have caused this. Or, if the SEO firm had access to the web hosting account, they could have changed the robots.txt settings for the website.

Regardless of how this unscrupulous SEO company hurt their ex-clients website rankings, it just highlights a theme I'm sure you've picked up in this blog. Namely, keep control of all your website assets and passwords. Web hosting and domains should be in your name, and under your control.

This will help you avoid being a victim if there's some sort of dispute with one of your service providers.

Fired SEO Firm Takes Business Owners Website Out of Google Search Results

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Make Sure You Get Your Fair Share of Server Resources With Green Geeks Shared Web Hosting

So here's the thing about shared web hosting - sometimes you get stuck with, for a lack of a better term, a pig website.

Pig? Ya, you know, a website that simply doesn't know how to share and tries to hog all the server resources. When the piggy takes all the resources, your site suffers with slow page load times.

This is why as websites "grow-up", and start to gain a significantly more traffic, a move up the hosting food chain to VPS or dedicated hosting is a good course of action.

Green Geeks, the best-selling green web hosting out there, has decided to approach shared hosting with a little bit of a twist. Green Geeks recently announced the use of Linux cloud technology in their shared web hosting. In a way, this new CloudLinux technology creates almost a hybrid VPS-shared hosting service. That's because GreenGeeks can now isolate webmasters into their own virtual segment. This makes it possible for GreenGeeks to identify an “abusive user” - the "piggy website" - who is using well-above their allotted computing resources.

The identified websites that are using too much server resources can be throttled down so to make sure the other webmaster's sites aren't negatively impacted by service interruptions, slow page load times, or complete site outages. The websites using too many server resources will be given the opportunity to upgrade to a hosting plan better suited to their needs. I'm guessing that some webmasters aren't trying to abuse the system, they just don't realize their website has "graduated" to needing a more robust hosting offering.

Most websites will never come close to the server limits at GreenGeeks, so this new technology will only affect a small percentage of the websites hosted. However, it's nice to see a host try different ideas to make sure websites don't become a victim of "pig" website's they just happen to be sharing a computer server with.

Make Sure You Get Your Fair Share of Server Resources With Green Geeks Shared Web Hosting

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Why You Should Consider VPS Hosting for Your Business Website

You already know that VPS means "virtual private server". Basically, VPS is the ability to sub-section a web server and give each section its own dedicated space and rebooting capabilities. So, your website ends up with a portion of a big capacity server that is exclusive to your business. Plus, you avoid the downsides of shared server hosting or the relatively high cost of using dedicated web servers.

But is VPS the best web hosting choice for your business website? Here's some considerations to think about:

  • Website Growth potential: You website traffic will be small when you launch your site. But what if the stars align and your site grows much faster than you thought it would? Don't miss business opportunities due to crashed shared web servers and slow loading pages because of the high traffic. Prepare for your success by using VPS hosting from the get go, or using a shared web hosting provider that can quickly move your site from shared to VPS hosting.
  • Save Money: Small businesses every where are trying to save every penny possible. VPS provides your business with the benefits of a dedicated server without all the dedicated hardware and associated maintenance costs. Big ecommerce businesses may require a dedicated server, but they have the revenue to afford it.
  • Website Security: VPS web hosting includes a dedicated IP address, which is necessary for a dedicated SSL certificate should your site need one. Unique-to-user password protected entries are also part of VPS hosting. Both of these multi-layered protections part of VPS help to make VPS is a secure pick for business web hosting.
  • Website Control: Control over your website’s applications and content with VPS hosting. VPS facilitates logging into your password protected control panel where you control and manage your website.

Hostgator is a wonderful shared web host. They also have affordable VPS plans that you should check out now if you're shopping for VPS hosting.

Why You Should Consider VPS Hosting for Your Business Website

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