Just got around to reading to this aricle about getting hacked, the story in itself was a good read and the suggestions to staying secure is a no brainer for everyone.
After a bunch of research, I decided to abandon dedicated servers entirely and move to a beefy DigitalOcean droplet running Ubuntu 14.04. It’s more powerful than my old server, provisioned instantly, and I’m paying a fraction of the price. DigitalOcean’s admin tools are phenomenal, and backups are automatic and painless.
DigitalOcean’s tutorials are absolutely incredible, and I found them invaluable in initial setup, securing Ubuntu, my firewall, MySQL, and using Fail2Ban to protect Apache and SSH. There’s still more work to do for monitoring intrusions, but it’s a start.
So, all of that sucked. But, while bittersweet, I’m better and stronger for it.
You should try the linked tutorials on your webhost/site.