When provisioning a dedicated server, many people overlook the importance of securing the server behind a hardware firewall. A hardware firewall is a physical security appliance that protects any server behind it from intrusion. The firewall prevents suspicious data, such as viruses and worms, from passing by screening all traffic going in and out. It also prevents sensitive data such as your credit card numbers and passwords from being stolen from your websites, databases and applications running on your server.
Unfortunately, there are many hackers on the Internet continually attempting to gain access to your data. They do this by setting up probes to monitor computers on the Internet for “holes” that can be exploited. Installing a firewall makes it harder for hackers and other computers to do this.
A firewall can be configured to allow certain traffic in and out of your server. To customize the firewall to meet your application needs exactly, we configure the firewall to recognize which programs can interact with the outside and who can read data from your server.
