Tips for safely accessing your site from anywhere
The number of things to think about when creating your website is overwhelming. Many of them are contingency plans that won’t come to fruition right away but may keep you hidden later. Backup is one example. Others will silently protect your site in the background, and you will never notice how helpful they are. A good firewall fills this role. Then there are some things that you won’t use right away, but will help you in the future. They must be prepared in advance. Thinking about how you can securely access your site from anywhere falls under this category. It may seem low on your priority list. But it’s one of those things that are important, but not necessarily urgent. As a result, it’s easy to keep putting it off until such time as you need to make changes to your site from an unfamiliar place. And this is when you might be in danger. In this article, let’s go over the risks of not having a solution, and what you can do about it.
Why do you need a plan to get to your site safely
If you find yourself at a Starbucks on public WiFi, needless to say, you must have an encrypted tunnel to your location that no one can snoop on. To some extent, this is mitigated with HTTPS encryption, but it’s also hard to rely on HTTPS alone for your protection. For one, your SSL protection may be incomplete. I’ve seen that some sites have admin pages over plain HTTP! Solutions like HSTS can help you, but they won’t allow you to access your site without HTTPS. If you need to make changes urgently, this is not a solution.
Don’t use regular FTP!
Under no circumstances should you use vanilla FTP to connect to your site. With FTP, your passwords are sent in plain text over the Internet. If you use WiFi in airports, for example, connecting to your site via FTP is hacky. So here are some ways to securely access your site from remote locations anywhere in the world.
Method 1: Use a paid VPN
The safest way to access your site on an untrusted network is to use a VPN service. A VPN creates a secure connection between your device and a remote server, which then connects to the destination site using a secure channel. This reliable connection is encrypted to prevent snooping even on open WiFi networks. Now it must be mentioned that this requires putting your trust in the VPN company itself. This is why I suggest you stay away from any “free” VPNs that have an incentive to try to do shady things like insert ads or snoop on your traffic.
Running your own VPN is best – but it’s complicated
Ideally you would run your own VPS and create a VPN using that. Since the remote server belongs to you, it can be implicitly trusted. Unfortunately, setting up a VPN on a server yourself is not for everyone. In the absence of such experience, you must sign up for a VPN service. Here are some reliable VPN services you can use: Cloudflare’s WARP Private Internet Access Mozilla VPN There are plenty of others of course, but these are the ones I trust.
Method 2: Use SFTP to access your files
If you need to access server files, you have two secure options: Use your web host’s SFTP file manager All web hosts will have a control panel (often cPanel), which will have A secure way to access your files. But the interface may be somewhat insufficient, and it may take time to connect. For a better long term solution, I would suggest you to use SFTP.
“Think ahead when it comes to security” The moral of the story is that you should always have a plan for semi-common situations when it comes to security. Getting access to your site from unknown and unreliable networks is always a risk, and requires a clear and thoughtful strategy in advance. We hope the pointers in this article help keep your site safe!
