What are the potential security risks associated with self-hosting a PHP website and how can they be mitigated?

One potential security risk of self-hosting a PHP website is SQL injection attacks, where malicious users can manipulate SQL queries to access or modify sensitive data in the database. This risk can be mitigated by using prepared statements and parameterized queries to sanitize user input before executing SQL queries.

// Mitigating SQL injection with prepared statements
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username');
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $username);
$stmt->execute();