Your website is a work of art-- it's a valuable and important tool that you should be proud of and an investment that most likely took time and effort to put together. The very last thing you want is for all of your hard work and money to be ruined by sneaky hackers or malicious software programs. Below, we have listed 3 preventative methods to protect your website from harmful or malicious hackers.

1.) Host your website locally

By choosing a local web company to host your site, such as Old City Web Services, you are guaranteed premium customer service and in the case that anything does go wrong, we have a 24/7 emergency line, scheduled backups to restore compromised sites and the ability to troubleshoot to detect the problem. The last thing you want is to go with an international web-based company and then when you need them the most, be put on hold for hours on end waiting for a customer service representative to answer.  Old City Web Services offers expert systems administration, 10 individual web-based e-mail accounts per domain and a listing in our directory on OldCity.com -  one of the top portals for visitors and locals receiving over 92,000 visitors just last month!

2.) Re-think your password

Although your dog's name may be easy to remember, a simple 4-letter word is asking for hackers to invade your site. It is especially important to secure a more complex password for sites that have a back-end log-in that can be accessed on any computer with internet access. Once your password is detected, your site content is vulnerable to malicious code without your knowledge! Make sure your password incorporates a combination of letters, numbers and symbols and is at least 8 characters long. Also, never save your passwords on your computer--even though it may be a hassle to re-type every time you log-in, this will prevent hackers from getting into your account. Additionally, you'll want to establish a method for changing your password every few months. You can relate it to the month it is changed, for example, your password could be *3wmnR13! then in 90 days change it to *6wmnR13! This is good practice for all of your online accounts that require a password such as online banking or email.  Lastly, write your passwords on a piece of paper and keep them in a safe location, just in case your computer ever crashes, you will always have a copy in your records.

3.) Always use CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA or "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart," is a program that detects whether or not the user on your site is a human or a computer. These are the colorful images with distorted text (see image below for example) that you often will see when entering your credit card online or filling out an application or registration form with your personal information. CAPTCHA should be used on any website that has a form in order to avoid abuse from "bots," or automated programs or scripts that are primarily written to generate spam.