ONLINE SECURITY - PREVENT YOUR SITE FROM BEING HACKED

We don't really have to say how much website security is important - nobody would like to wake up one morning and see his home page offering cheap Viagra or Cialis, for example. There are a lot of ways to prevent this, and today we will share with you some tips on how to better secure your site.
Use the latest software versions. While this may sound like something, which everybody knows and does, it's not uncommon to find a very old version of a script running on a certain site. The words "it was working okay, so why update it" can sound like a reasonable excuse, right until the moment your site is hacked. Newer software versions often include security patches for exploits found in previous versions. This is very important if you are using a CMS script like Joomla or WordPress.
Check for common vulnerabilities. Cross-site scripting and SQL injections are the usual suspects - there are a lot of tools, which can help you check if your site is secure. Such vulnerabilities are most commonly found in custom developed websites - the popular CMS scripts are usually well protected against such attacks.
Check your log files. The log files may seem like just gibberish and non-sense technical data, but they are actually important - they can show you information about who tried to access your site, what errors were caused, etc. It's always surprising what you can find in your logs. A check a week or so will not hurt your free time, but will be good for your site's security.
Check your files' permissions. On a Linux sever, the file permissions will determine who can access and modify your files. Select your permissions so that only you can edit them, and avoid using 777 permissions - a file with such permissions can be edited and executed by anybody, which is dangerous.
Use secure passwords. The simplest type of attack is a brute force attack - a script will try to guess your password, using random letters and numbers. The more complex the password is, the harder it will be to break it down. Passwords, such as "mypass", are much easier to break. A combination of lower and upper case letters plus numbers will make the password much more secure - mYp43s. If possible, you can also add symbols to make your password even more secure. However, have in mind to keep your passwords easy to remember - you wouldn't want to forget your password and not be able to log into your mail, for example.

Handling Duplicate Content on Your Website:

When you are building your own website, sooner or later you run into the question - how to handle duplicate content? What do I mean by that? Imagine that you have a highly visited web page, which receives most of the daily visits. You are planning to re-design the website, and give this web page a new URL and a fresh new look, but don’t want to lose all that traffic from that old page. And you can’t keep both of them online, since they will have most likely the same content text-wise - something, which is often penalized by search engines. How do you proceed from there?
The best practice is to do a 301 redirect. The 301 message on the Internet is handled by the search engine as: moved permanently. Here is how you can make a 301 redirect for your web page:
With PHP:
The code needs to be placed in the Header section of the website, so that the search engine can read it first.
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
With .htaccess:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^old\.php$ http://www.domain.com/new.php [R=permanent,L]
The code above will direct all the traffic from the old.php to the new.php page.
With the rel=”canonical” directive:
If you run an online store and want to sell a custom made handbag, which is available in several colors, and decide to dedicate a separate page on your site for each color, then you have about 3 or 4 identical pages. You can use the rel=”canonical” element to direct all traffic to the page with the most popular color.
This will lead a search engine to point all the traffic from the similar pages to the page you have specified. This code needs to be placed in the header section of all the web pages you wish to lead somewhere else.
With the URL Redirection Manager in the Web Hosting Control Panel:
If you don’t like to meddle with code, or with new file creation, or anything like that, you can use the handy URL Redirection Manager available with all our shared web hosting plans, where a simple web interface will allow you to choose which pages to be redirected and what redirection code to be used.