Passwords, Passwords, Passwords, what a hassle! Yet so important for your online security as well as the security of your website. How do you take the hassle out of passwords? I like to keep it simple, which is what Real Website Hints is all about! Keep it simple, but effective. My favorite way to deal with all the passwords that I need is LastPass!
As a web developer even if it’s just a hobby there are a lot of passwords you need to remember and it’s always a good idea to have a separate password for every account and login that you have. I you want to read why you should have separate passwords for each login just check out this post from Krebs on Security about how passwords and logins are resold. Scary!
Lets look at a small sliver of all of the passwords that I have to remember:
For my Hosting with Dreamhost. I have a separate login to my dreamhost account. A different user for each of the 7 domains that I run. Plus the Cloudflare account that Dreamhost gives you . Then there are all the other services and plugin vendors that I use. And that’s just for me as a web developer let alone my personal life!
I have found LastPass to be essential to keep my passwords straight.
LastPass works as a plugin for most browsers and it works with both Mac and PC. The premium version features Android, iOS and Windows Phone so you can access your passwords even if you aren’t at a computer. If you want to get crazy with your security LastPass also offers additional security features like multi factor authentication. So that you can have a physical device or card as an additional security measure.
Coming up with hard to crack passwords is also a challenge. LastPass makes that easy for you to create a unique password for every site you sign for.
Sometimes you need help, LastPass makes it easy to securely share your passwords.
An awesome feature that LastPass has is the ability to securely share passwords. When developing websites sometimes you need help. To get that help sometimes you need to share your passwords. The feature does require that the person that you are sharing with has LastPass, but it’s free to sign up and you get a lot of features with the free version. When you decide to share your password you get the option of revealing what the password is or not. That’s kind of cool. The downside is that in web development you often need to make the password visible to the person you are sharing it with. Keeping the password hidden only works for standard web forms. Things like ftp login you will have to share the actually password, but at least you have a way to send it securely and remember who you have shared the password with. When it’s time to unshare the password and change it LastPass makes it easy.
I think of LastPass as an essential tool for every web developer and just for any one who uses the internet. If your interested in reading more about LastPass check out this article The How to Geek Guide to Getting Started with LastPass
