So you’ve got a shiny new server, it’s connected to the net, and you (or your hosting company) has done the right thing by turning telnet off and forcing the much more secure option of using SSH to connect. But it doesn’t end there, there are quite a few little things you can do to further tighten access and keep the boogey men at bay.

Memcached is an alternative to database storage that is often useful for session storage and caching. It was developed by the guys at live journal to help them maintain their unwieldy sessions. Since then it’s gained a lot of popularity among the PHP and Rails folk because it removes some of the burden on the typical database bottle neck, and allows things like session to be maintained across a cluster of servers.