All your work, lost...gone!! - What should a newbie/intermediate do to make sure their work is safe?

Hi Warriors,

Yesterday a friend of mine had a few issues with her site, error pages, sudden disconnected links, etc. At first glance it looked like her sites had been hacked but thank da Lord it wasn’t anything that serious.

This got me thinking about my own sites.

I have been working at IM for over a year so I am no newbie but there are a lot of areas I still get confused with.

One of those areas is security.

Ok, I do back-ups every so often saving the info from my computer hard drive which will help if my comp suddenly dies on me.

But…..what about all the stuff that goes on within the internet, within my sites?

I am not the most computer literate person and get confused with jargon and complicated instructions very easily so I am searching for some kind of basic security set up that I can go through to at least ensure some safety.

What steps can a newbie, (I consider myself a newbie when it comes to security), take in order to:

1. Keep hackers at bay.
2. Save their whole website. Do hosting companies do this? I am with Hostgator.
3. And any other essential information that an IMer needs to know to ensure safety within their business.

If anyone can help I would appreciate it. I need to get this thing sorted soon as my business is slowly growing and I would be devastated if I lost it all due to lack of security.

Thanks
Andy