Two major upgrades last night.

First, we’ve moved Clarity Accounting to new servers at a new hosting provider with the following benefits:

• Server “Hot Failover”: If one of the server computers running the software dies for any reason, all the work it was doing is automatically redistributed to other computes while that one is replaced
• RAID-1 storage: All data is saved onto multiple hard drives, so that if a hard drive wears out no data is lost.
• Isolation of components: The major components of the servers run inside their own virtual machine, so that if one of them is compromised the others are not affected.  For example, if someone hacks our blog, he can mess up our blog but he can’t access any financial data.
• Intelligent firewall with intrusion and attack detection
• Improved security practices, including using non-standard ports and public keys for SSH server access
• More powerful servers that can handle more users and virtually unlimited data storage
• Learn more about the security of our new hosting service here.

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As people increasingly use online services like GMail, Online Banking, Clarity Accounting, Amazon, and so on they are exposing themselves to the possibility that someone else will guess their password and use their account for some nefarious purposes.

Many people deal with this by using the same password for all their accounts, while others use a really easy to remember password.

In Security Basics: A Strong Password is the Key, Jamie Bsales discusses the importance of secure passwords, and a couple ways to have a hard to guess password that you can still remember.

Here is my technique for keeping my passwords secure:

• Choose one long, hard-to-guess password
• Get a password manager like KeePass, Sxipper (for firefox users), or Roboform
• Generate unique passwords for each service and store them securely in your password manager
• Use the random password generator in the password manager to generate a good strong password for each service

Here’s some ways to come up with a long hard-to-guess password for yourself:

• Pick a phrase that means something to you
• This could be: a passage from the Bible, a piece of poetry you can easily remember, or the name of your favorite author
• If it’s too long, use the first letter of each word to make a new jumbled word
• If it’s only a little too long, try just removing all vowels
• Replace some letters with numbers, symbols, or alternative spellings (e.g. S = $, E = 3, L = 1, O = 0, A = 4, I = Y)
• Don’t scramble it too much, or you’ll forget it!

Finally, most online services allow you to reset your password as long as you can access your email, so don’t be too concerned about forgetting those passwords - just make sure your email account has a secure password that you won’t forget.

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• Learn more about Clarity Accounting
• Try a demo
• Sign up for a 30-day free trial
• Log in to Clarity Accounting