In January, my business website, author site, and website for The Feisty Freelancer were hacked. Getting them back online took about six weeks and was a costly ordeal. Always looking for an upside, I figured the best one here would be helping others avoid my mistakes. So here goes.
𝗕𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝘂𝗽. 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗹𝘆, 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝘂𝗽.
I’d been fiddling with a plugin that kept stalling on the backup and — busy with everything else — I let it slide. First reminder: back up your website, and do it in multiple ways. Fortunately, I had a copy of my content in a Word document, so I wasn’t starting from scratch on the writing. But I wish I’d taken screenshots. I did end up using the Wayback Machine (the internet’s archive of websites), which turned out to be more useful than I expected.
𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗵𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝘆 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗯𝗲 𝗼𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘀𝗶𝗱𝗲
When I discovered my websites were down — I found out by not being able to log into my account — I reached out by chat and then phone. The response was essentially: not our problem. My options were to remove the malicious code myself (in what world does a non-technical person have the skills for that?), pay for a remediation company they’d connect me with, or hire my own developer. Fortunately, I had a developer who’d helped with my last redesign, so I called them in. Unfortunately, by the time they got involved, the sites had stopped working entirely. It was not a quick fix.
𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝘄𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸, 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹
This wasn’t actually my first rodeo with an unhelpful hosting company — I’d switched to this one about a decade ago after a similar experience with the previous one. One of the nicer things about being an adult in a free market is that you don’t have to keep paying an organization that refuses to help you when it counts. My new hosting company includes automatic backups as a standard feature. That’s now at the top of my list of things to look for in a host.
𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿
Once my sites were back up, I used the opportunity to tackle a few things that had been sitting on my to-do list since the last redesign. I also asked my developer to add extra security measures so this doesn’t happen again.
And now I’m telling everyone — because if this post saves even one person from a six-week ordeal and an unexpected bill, that’s the upside I was looking for.
I also share these blog posts on LinkedIn – visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/sbowness/ to connect with me there. Or hire me to help you develop your content strategy!
