Scared of being hacked/losing everything!
 

Please tell me the vital steps i need to take to prevent all this?

Take backups, and you won't lose everything if you do get hacked.

Create STRONG passwords for everything, make backups and read all the posts and articles on vbulletin.com and here about securing your forums and your admincp

how do i make backups and what do they do?

I own a couple forums taylored to an underground sub-culture... and while there's been a ton of DoS attacks on several sites within that particular community, like said above... as long as you keep doing regular backups, you'll never lose everything. Even if attacked, and you do lose everything... the last back up you did will restore your forum and all info to when that back up was done. Don't worry about it too much.

Please read the following thread on how to improve security for your board:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=194701

can you automatically make a backup every few days or summit?

yes, your host should be doing this for you already, definitely ask them to do a backup every night.

Hosts usually charge to restore. And I wouldn't rely on them for backups. I think what he is looking for is a backup of the database which he can have access to. You can even conduct one every few hours if you have a busy board. The more often you do it, the more data will be captured.

But what if your board database is 2GB?

Backing up every few hours is going to put your bandwidth usage through the roof and also put a strain on your server thus slowing it down. Thats why most backups are done at night.

Last time I tried to do a backup myself, my server hit 15.0 (usually its under 1.0)

I use this to make my database backups. A couple times a day. I usually just save my files to my hard drive

That's only if is board is that big, it's not required to backup several times a day, but it helps.

I just suggest you should handle your own backups. Hosts also give a time frame of 48hrs+, it very rigid.

--------------- Added [DATE]1249035383[/DATE] at [TIME]1249035383[/TIME] ---------------

Do you download from that directory or are they sent to you automatically?

I encode my config.php file using latest online ioncube encoder (which can be found on their website) so if someone roots the server, they don't have the mysql details.

When a new version of ioncube comes out, i re-encode again incase the crackers can uncode the previous version.

You will need to buy credits first, but its cheap.

Don't use something like Zend as its basically pointless and can be decoded within seconds.