[Turf]

1) What's the best way to prevent someone from hacking/cloning/copying my website?

2) Is there a way to hide my source code? Or at least make it private, so that nobody can really see it?

I understand they can probably rip-off and copy my design and there'd be nothing I can do about it- but in terms of functionality, scripts, actual working code, etc, can I prevent these from being stolen/easily cloned?

My site is powered in PHP and MySQL.

[pthnmj]

Obfuscate Scripts... Encrypt the code... Browsers can read the encrypted code... but if it's encrypted, it will be hard for them to decrypt it...

[TheWholeWorldExplodes]

Php is server side, if you're talking about html and other client side then your sort of out of luck

[Turf]

Php is server side, if you're talking about html and other client side then your sort of out of luck

Yup, my website is powered using PHP/MySQL, and HTML/CSS.

How does a site like Facebook or Twitter protect themselves from being cloned? I imagine it isn't easy for any developer to single-handedly 'clone' Facebook/Twitter without effort.

[InfoOcean]

Copyrights and good lawyers prevent sites from being "cloned".
There is no way to be completely secure. Just do research and implement security measures that work and are reasonable for what you're trying to achieve.

[Fudster]

You can't clone server sided code. They can only copy the html/JavaScript etc.

Personally I don't think it's much to worry about.about

[TheWholeWorldExplodes]

Facebook do regularly get copied, it's just their actual scripting that is secure. Their html and css can still be copied easily enough

[hahdbwoannniabs]

There's no way to prevent against HTML/CSS/Javascript ripping. PHP on the other hand is server side, making it impossible to rip directly.

[cyberducky]

There are too many ways for people to copy websites. All I can think of is have crawler protection.

[TheWholeWorldExplodes]

Look at any wix site, it does well to hide a lot of its code via its use of html 5