You've created a great site, customized its design, and added valuable content. That's an investment worth protecting. Rest assured, most Joomla sites will run for years without any hiccups. However, it's a good idea to take some precautions to minimize the risk of your website getting broken. A few simple measures can make it a lot harder for malicious hackers to get access to your site and mess up its contents. Backing up regularly can get you out of trouble fast if you run into hardware disasters (think crashing hard drives) or software trouble (installing extensions that somehow mess up your existing site). Fortunately, these problems are rare, but it's definitely worth the little extra time investment needed to minimize risks.
How can you protect your site and how do you get your site up and running again when something has gone wrong? This appendix contains some essential tips and best practices to keep your site in perfect health (and save yourself some headaches too).
Tip
Choosing a web host that meets security requirements
In this appendix, you'll learn what you, as the site administrator, can do to keep your site safe. However, there are also some basic but critical security measures that your web hosting company should take. You'll probably have a shared hosting account, where multiple sites are hosted on one computer server, each site having access to their part of the available disk space and resources. Although this is much cheaper than hiring a dedicated server to host your site, it does involve some security risks. Good web hosting companies take precautions to minimize these risks. When selecting your web host, it's worth checking if they have a good reputation for keeping their security up to standards. The official Joomla resources site (http://resources.joomla.org/directory/support-services/hosting.html) features hosting companies that fully meet the security requirements of a typical Joomla-powered site.