A year and a half ago or so, this WordPress-based website was hosted by a rapidly disintegrating shared-hosting platform that was the networking equivalent of a wide-open frontier town which had been hit by a virulent pathogen. The original site host I had signed with was almost immediately bought out by an internet slumlord, and in only a matter of weeks the promised protections, service and support went from adequate to abysmal. As such I had to become much more knowledgeable about protecting my site from everything from outages to intrusions, including automated attempts to break into the back-end/control panel. [ Read more ]