Protecting Your WordPress Installation

Many web hosts offer their hosting accounts with tons of features – including auto-installers for many popular Open Source software packages. One of the most popular software packages offerd with these automated installers is the blogging software “Wordpress”. WordPress is a very popular blogging  software and can be used for blogging, but is also frequently used as a content management system (CMS). With the high popularity of this software come more risks as well. Worpdress has been targeted by many hackers over the years and while the software is quite secure, there is always a risk.

For one, outdated installations of WordPress can be easily hacked and second the available plugins might also be a backdoor for a hacker. I recently came across this new firewall plugin for WordPress and decided to install it on one of my WordPress driven websites for testing. It turned out to be a great success. I had the plugin configured to email me upon attack. The plugin stopped several SQL injection attacks based out of China last night while I was sleeping. While I was dreaming about more affiliate success (just kidding) the WordPress firewall plugin protected my website and did let the attacker run into this virtual roadblock.

The firewall plugin is free to use and therefore should be a standard plugin for you to install on your WordPress installation at your web host of choice. The firewall plugin is extremely easy to configure as you can see on the pictures below. It comes completely pre-configured (you might want to add your email address of choice) so that you do not have to do anything other than activating the plugin.

My recommendation for you would be to install it as soon as possible. I have several websites running on WordPress and are pushing the plugin out to all of them. The Firewall Plugin for WordPress is available from here.

If you do need a web host where you can run WordPress, check out IX Web Hosting and Hostgator – both are excellent choices when it comes to cheap webhosting.