Over many years of providing hosting services, I've been through a huge number of backup strategies.  The servers that we use all run Plesk (different versions), and to be honest I have moved in recent years from using pretty heavily customized environments, to running things pretty much as they come from MediaTemple and Parallels.  The reasoning here is simple - recovering from disaster can be accomplished simply on a standard box.

In developing e-commerce sites, we are frequently asked by our clients to explain the various facets of developing a "secure" web site.  I thought it might be helpful to put some of what we know on our web site for those of you that aren't fortunate enough to work with us directly .

There are a couple of different elements to security that you need to understand.