I am very new to Linux and it seems I made a big mistake with my first Linux VPS. I use the VPS to host a few personal WordPress sites. While troubleshooting why the auto-upgrade feature of WordPress was not working, I determined (with some help from IRC folks) that Apache server was running as “root”. They explained to me why this is bad. I had always logged into my server as “root” when setting up Apache, MySQL and WordPress.
What I am wondering is how I should have done things differently? Should I have a created a new user and logged in as that user to install WordPress? Is there any way to get Apache to run under a new account so I can avoid wiping out my VPS and starting over? Thanks for any help.
You can determine what user apache runs as with an entry in your httpd.conf file
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mpm_common.html#user