When you talk about computers and security, passwords are inevitable. So we’ll start of with passwords: how do you choose a good and secure one?

To approach security it is usually best to think like a criminal trying to breach that security, so what would a hacker do?

• If he knows anything about you he will try this information to make a password. Your name, your date of birth, the name of your cat will all be tried. This usually in combination with a number.
• He will try some common passwords everybody uses: password, letmein or 1234 etc.

If this fails he will generally approach an encrypted file with brute force attacks. This means that he will let a computer try every possible password on your access. He can automatically try all the words in the dictionary or even let all the letters of the alphabet and numbers pass one by one. As such a longer password would take him longer to crack.

This process will usually start with your mail because while it is considered very insecure many companies still send passwords through mail.

So this is where all the rules involving passwords come from:

• Try words that do not come from the dictionary or that are commonly used
• Don’t use anything that other people can know about you, names, names of friends and relatives, social security number, date of birth
• Don’t use any common passwords
• The longer the better but keep eight as a minimum.
• Combine letters and numbers and special characters if possible.
• Change any password you received in the mail immediately

And of course:

• Try not writing passwords down, mailing them or mentioning them out loud
• Do not keep them in an unencrypted file on you computer, find more information about safely storing passwords in part 2 of these series.

Update: this is another great trick for better passwords from lifehacker.com.

First thing you want to do is get yourself a domain name, this is basically the adress of your new website. Ours is Innovi.net. (Costs arround 10 dollars a year)

Setup domain hoster

Hosting

For a website to run it needs to be on a computer, a very stable one to ensure that your website and mail systems stay online. A computer that has some extra requirements than the one you have at home.

• a computer with a great internet connexion as more people have to be able to connect to it at the same time.
• with another computer to take over at the point the firstone fails
• fire protection
• backup generator in case electricity falls out.
• the processor and memory of the server can play a role if there are more advanced systems on it with a lot of visitors

This is why computers with websites on them are generally in so called datacenters: big hallways with only computers that do nothing more than serving websites. This is why they are called servers.

One server can take care of hundreds of visits at the same time, and it is likely that your website doesn’t need a whole computer or what we call a dedicated server: you have the whole server to yourself. This means you get a lot of space (the whole harddisk of the computer) but in many cases also that you have to manage and install the software yourself. The fact that you are reading this article probably means that you would need some help with that.

Shared hosting: The computer is divided into smaller with different layouts for each user. Your space is limited as is the ammount of visits you can have each month, but most websites do not require a whole computer. While a server can be 250 gb most company sites can work with only 100mb in space (0,1 gb)

The domain will be setup to point in to a folder on your space and as such you can start putting files in there. These files start of with a file called index.html or index.php this is the startfile of your site/domain After there can be other files that the index file uses for the layout or the content of your site: typically pictures, videos but there are many more possibilities. These can exist in folders which than automatically become innovi.net/folder.

So for this content you’ll have to decide how much space you need for your website. This is the webspace that your hosting company is refering to.

A bit harder to determine is the amount of data that you can transfer. This depends on how much of the data is loaded by the visitors of your webpage. Usually it is best to just take whatever you got with the space and change it if it is not enough.

You can find hosting for a few bucks a month but do not go for the first you find: