Hello,
I have around 2 years of webmaster experience, with this site and other's, any throughout that I've constantly learnt form my mistakes and now I don't make the same ones again. I thought I'd compile this guide to maintaining a professional site, as well as some security tips.
1: Holiday/Vacation - When your going on holiday/vacation for a while, don't make a global announcement saying your doing so, infact don't tell anyone other than forum staff or neighbours that you trust. The reasoning for this is simple. A hacker would think 'perfect, the owner with root access isn't here, time to do some damage' and they could get upto all kind of things, looking for vulnerabilites in the site, scanning for open ports, etc and you (the owner) would be none the wiser as to what's going on. So to sum up, only tell people who NEED to know if your going away, also remember to take a full backup of your site's files and database. It also wouldn't harm you to delete FTP accounts while your away, since you won't be using them, it's just one less way for damage to be done.
2: Completing User/Staff Requests - Sometimes you get requests from your users or staff, and they can be simple/easy to complete and if you can do them, then that's all good and well. However when you get bigger requests or things that could be harder to complete, you get put of doing so. If a website is small, it's best to add the request, even if it is very time consuming or hard to do because all sites start out small and people will just get put off and leave if you don't try to do as they ask. There are limits to how far you can go though, for example if they are asking you to change the software, and it's not possible to do so without loosing your database, deny the request.
3: Don't make promises you can't keep - All sites want to start competions and offer things to encourage people to come to the site. The biggest mistake people make is offering prizes and rewards that they can't actually give, such as offering a money reward, when you don't have enough money. The best thing you can do is save up your money until you have a decent amount then start a competion and more people will be tempted to join as the money reward would be bigger.
IN CONSTRUCTION.
I have around 2 years of webmaster experience, with this site and other's, any throughout that I've constantly learnt form my mistakes and now I don't make the same ones again. I thought I'd compile this guide to maintaining a professional site, as well as some security tips.
1: Holiday/Vacation - When your going on holiday/vacation for a while, don't make a global announcement saying your doing so, infact don't tell anyone other than forum staff or neighbours that you trust. The reasoning for this is simple. A hacker would think 'perfect, the owner with root access isn't here, time to do some damage' and they could get upto all kind of things, looking for vulnerabilites in the site, scanning for open ports, etc and you (the owner) would be none the wiser as to what's going on. So to sum up, only tell people who NEED to know if your going away, also remember to take a full backup of your site's files and database. It also wouldn't harm you to delete FTP accounts while your away, since you won't be using them, it's just one less way for damage to be done.
2: Completing User/Staff Requests - Sometimes you get requests from your users or staff, and they can be simple/easy to complete and if you can do them, then that's all good and well. However when you get bigger requests or things that could be harder to complete, you get put of doing so. If a website is small, it's best to add the request, even if it is very time consuming or hard to do because all sites start out small and people will just get put off and leave if you don't try to do as they ask. There are limits to how far you can go though, for example if they are asking you to change the software, and it's not possible to do so without loosing your database, deny the request.
3: Don't make promises you can't keep - All sites want to start competions and offer things to encourage people to come to the site. The biggest mistake people make is offering prizes and rewards that they can't actually give, such as offering a money reward, when you don't have enough money. The best thing you can do is save up your money until you have a decent amount then start a competion and more people will be tempted to join as the money reward would be bigger.
IN CONSTRUCTION.
but thanks for share George! 
