8 Ways to Protect Your Blog and Recover from a Disaster

What would you do if you woke up this morning and found yourself locked out of your blog? Or worse still, your blog had completely vanished?

Lately I’ve been noticing more disgruntled bloggers who are finding themselves in that very position, apparently the victims of a blog hijacking by nefarious hackers who have nothing better to do.

So it got me thinking about what I can do to make sure that it doesn’t happen to me. This post is the result of that brainstorm, so here are a few ideas that you can do to prevent or recover from a blog disaster happening to you: 1. The first thing you can do on the front lines of defence is to make certain that you have a strong password. Passwords that combine alphanumeric letters, numbers and ASCII characters are the strongest. Keep your password private, do not leave it unencrypted on your desktop and never, ever give it out in a digital format (i.e. email, chat etc.) under any circumstances.

2. I recommend a minimum of 8 characters or longer, and you should make your own password. I would not use a web service or software application to generate it for the simple reason that if your system is already compromised someone could be capturing your data without your knowledge. Avoid using common phrases or words that can be found in the dictionary because these are easily broken by special cracking software created by the hackers.

3. Now watch this shocking video that shows just one method how hackers can steal your passwords:

4. Besides installing your own desktop security package, you should also get in the habit of using an online virus scan at least once a week. I use Trend Micro Housecall. Leave it running all night and you might be surprised what it finds in the morning.

5. Wordpress users have the added protection of being able to protect individual folders and directory contents with .htaccess.

6. Wordpress users should also subscribe to the official wordpress newsfeed and stay abreast of software security patches and updates.

7. You can also prevent most searchbots and spiders from accessing specific directories by using a robots.txt. You can read more about it at the robots exclusion site.

8. Last and perhaps most importantly, always make regular backups of your blog. I’ve written about this before so I won’t go into any detail except to say if the worst should happen you can always create another blog and put your backup data into it. Then redirect your url address to the new blog (which is another reason why you should also be using a custom domain).

Whatever you do, do not rely on your blog host to do it all for you, especially if you are a Blogger user. It’s almost impossible to get a hold of a live support person when you need one.

These are just a few things you can do to protect your blog. Do you have any more ideas? Have I missed anything?

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