A Shared Firewall is an additional product providing greater security and control over who accesses your server and and for what purposes.

By default, all major protocols and ports are allowed to your Donhost dedicated server. This means, protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, POP3, SMTP, RDP/SSH & DNS are allowed publicly by default.

Purchasing the shared firewall product allows you to further control this, by blocking ports that shouldn’t be accessible publicly, and by restricting access to a specific IP address on the web. For example, you can restrict RDP or SSH to only the IP address you administer your server from (Home/Office ADSL). Services you only run internally on the server such as SQL can also be completely blocked from the internet.

For an external client to obtain a server’s content, the request is made to a specific port on your server which is running a particular service. For example, HTTP usually runs on port 80.

A service that is allowed through, will accept the request and pass it to your server for response. For services you block, the request will be denied at the firewall itself, ensuring your server is never contacted. This blocks this specific port from being publically available and stops people from discovering what services are running on your server.

Management of access is maintained within the Firewalls section of the Control Panel.

For an external client to obtain a server’s content, the request is made to a specific port on your server which is running a particular service. For example, HTTP usually runs on port 80.

A service that is allowed through, will accept the request and pass it to your server for response. For services you block, the request will be denied at the firewall itself, ensuring your server is never contacted. This blocks this specific port from being publicly available and stops people from discovering what services are running on your server.