A while ago I already posted an article about problems getting SEF URL's work on 1&1-s servers and thought I know how to deal with the idiosyncrasies of 1&1's (very unprofessional) server settings. I was wrong...

Generally, backup is something you need to breathe, not just use, if you are in this business. It's the number one security tool. Having a fresh and usable backup can be a life saver in a number of situations, not only when your site is hacked, but on a great number of other situation, beginning from human error (accidentally deleted key parts of site - or just forgot to pay your hosting bill) to situations out of your control, as a hardware/software failure. And is essential to have an easy to use tool to move your site around - from local development environment to live hosting, or from one server to another. Enter Akeeba Backup (former Joomla Pack), a must have tool for any Joomla webmaster.

Sometimes you need to block a certain IP address, a group of addresses or certain hosts from accessing your Joomla website. Reasons may include:

• It's a hacking attempt coming from that IP
• Someone is scraping content from your website
• A brute-force attack (in most cases a DoS - Denial of Service - attack is originated from that IP (there are too many requests coming from a particular IP
• Someone continuously spamming your website
• Some content from your site (images, media files) are hotlinked from your website.

The solution is simple, but is advised to apply first other tools to stop these bad guys - overuse of this tip can slow down your site considerably, use it ony if you don't have anything else - or you are in hurry to stop an ongoing attack.

If you search on Google for the term "joomla can't login after moving to new server" - or something similar, you will get more, than 1 million hits for most of the combinations.

So, you aren't alone. And there are plenty of suggestions, on what might gone wrong and how you might find that, and there are verious fixes. But what if you moved the site to another domain? From development server to it's final place? This is a subject wich is rarely touched by those advices.

Changing your database password is something you rarely need, but then you need it immediately, and with the lowest possible downtime. Why you should do that, in first time? Hm, there are many reasons/situations when you should consider changing your database access data ASAP:

• You just got hacked
• You have decided to end the business with your current developer, and you aren't sure that he's a trustable person
• You have a good habit of changing all your passwords regularly

Choose your extensions wisely - one basic rule when you develop a Joomla site. And same applies to you, weekend webmasters! Your site is a sitting duck, waiting for hackers (especially script kiddies. Well, easy to say it, but what can be seen as "wise" choice here?

You have done a great job by cleaning your recently hacked file? Excellent, but you not finished yet!

If you were blacklisted by Google, McAfee, Yandex (or any other web spam authorities), your site is showing various malware warnings to your visitors, wich can be a big turn down factor. Luckily you can request a review after the hack has been fixed.

Be sure your site is clean before requesting a review!

To remove malware warnings on your site:

• Call your hosting company and ask them to remove the suspension.

  • You may need to provide details about how you removed the malware.

• Fill in a review request form for each blacklisting authority.

  • Google Search Console
  • McAfee SiteAdvisor
  • Yandex Webmaster
  • Norton Site Security
  • (any other similar service backlisting your site)
• The review process can take several days.

A denial of service attack takes place when a hacker overloads a system with large or repeated requests for a service.

Do you have some old Joomla site (pre Joomla 1.5.6)? then is very likely you will got - or already have - a site running only halfway, full of errors saying

or

Yeah, you might allready guessed it, the PHP 4.* end of life-cycle is wreaking havoc in Joomla 1.0 sites and some early Joomla 1.5 implementations - or even newer sites, having badly coded third party extensions installed.

In another post about Function eregi() deprecated I provided some readily fixed Joomla 1.0 files to overcome issues related with upgrading to PHP 5.3 for Joomla 1.0 sites. But since a Joomla site is not built only from the core code, but there are other third party add-ons too, not only these older Joomla sites can be plagued by bad coding practices. The most problematic issues are related with templates. Most of the addons are fixed already, but you might have templates with unsupported functions. Here are couple of tricks wich might help you fix them!

A website is stored within a file system on a server. Some of the server's file system is therefore exposed to the outside world and can be accessed by an end-user's web browser. The part of the file system (or directory structure) that is visible to the outside world is limited to a specific root folder and its contents.

One of often overlooked security (and not only) resource for any Joomla site is under your fingertips! With each Joomla install (even from the old Mambo days) you have a file named htaccess.txt in your site's root directory. In most cases is never touched, and left as is - most weekend webmasters don't even know what is for. A few are using it to help Joomla or the specialized SEF URL builders to make those pretty SEF URL's for their site. And that's pretty easy - in most cases it's enough to rename it to .htaccess, and you are set. But there is much more power hidden there...

A while ago I wrote a tip about problems geting SEF URL's work on 1&1-s servers. Back then I didn't realized, that the problem is the same - or at least fairly similar - on GoDaddy's servers too. Not everywhere, I have a site running on GoDaddy with sh404SEF without any need of tweaking the .htaccess file, but recently I had issues with another site.

So, the trick above solves the problem, but what is the cause?

Pissed off, eh? Me too! After you put together your site (small or big, hobbyist site or a large corporate one) and installed all the security gizmos available out there you began to receive all kind of alerts about hacking attempts. This is the good scenario - succesful hacking attempts usually aren't reported: you experience the sometimes devastating effects by visiting the site.

Anyway, you probably get frustrated over time, and you definitively will try to do something above just stopping these attacks.

Did you followed the advices of SEO gurus, and now you have a bunch of domain names, like mydomain.com and mydomain.org, mydomain.info and mybestdomain.net, and you want to use all of them to display your sole, well built Joomla site, but dunno how? Here's the trick you need!

Even if hosting Joomla on GoDaddy can be challenging, and anybody ever built a site on their servers will tell you to turn to some better Joomla host, many people still choose them because of the excellent price/offering ratio. Here are a few tips that will help you get Joomla running on GoDaddy with minimum fuss.

Yes, things like media files - or your software. No, I don't sell software - I give it away for free, for example here. Bu I build sites with selling capabilities. My favorite solution for it is VirtueMart, THE shop to be used with Joomla.

Is powerful - but is not for beginners, you can easily lost here without proper guidance.

The use of pictures in Joomla is a bit different from the methods you are used before, so you need to learn new habits here. But the first problem is usually not that, but how to upload those pictures to the site.

First of all we strongly recommend some additional components to your Joomla site, if you don't have done allready.

On the top of these recommended add-ons are the file/FTP managers joomlaXplorer/Ninja eXplorer/OSE Filemanager and the WYSIWYG editor JCE. We will use both recipes here.

Did you added something to a perfectly working Joomla site, and you suddenly have a blank age instead your site? Chances are that you hit the memory limit allowed to you on your server. Memory limits help to keep scripts from running out of control or using up all of your free memory. This value is generally carefully set by your host's SYSADMIN to let the hosted sites to run smoothly without bottlenecking each other by overusing this precious system resource.

The full error looks like this:

You might see this nagging error every once you install something to your Joomla site. Apparently everything working, but - as any errors you see - should alert you: something isn't right with your site, and even if apparently everything works, you might have unexpected problems later!