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When evaluating the security of your business be sure to include website security in your lengthy check list.

The following are few simple tips to keep the everyday website user out of your important confidential information:

1. To evaluate your website security, first evaluate the sensitivity of the information contained with-in your website. Then decide what risks are worth taking and how to best protect your valuable information. If your using your website to do any e-commerce than you obviously need some security in place. However, it is often the websites that have less sensitive information that fall victim to security breeches. If your website contains passwords or client contact information you need to be extra careful.
2. Check to make sure that your web hosting provider has set up the server correctly so that none of their other clients can gain access to your website.
3. Ensure that your databases are outside of the web accessible areas! It is also a good idea to try downloading your database through the web accessible area. If the web hosting provider has set up the server correctly you should not be able to download databases through anything except ftp:// accessible areas. It is also a good idea to make sure that your web hosting company has not set up your account so that others can see your sub-folder contents.
4. Be sure to secure any databases by using the database security settings that are available. That way even if someone gains access to your website they can not gain access to the data within your database, at least not without some extreme effort.
5. Secure your Statistics Package. Your stats may show others how to access your valuable information, and why are you allowing your competitors to see how many hits you had last week?
6. Ensure that your web hosting provider's server is safe from physical tampering. Is it in a locked room? Have you asked them about their security policies?
7. Never ever give out your passwords to anyone who does not require access. Always ensure your passwords are hard to break.

As you can see, web site security is just basic common sense, and knowing enough to ask your web hosting provider a few tough questions.