WHEW! We’re Back Online!

We’ve had some Hosting troubles for nearly a year. Our Hosting Account was suspended. Our sites have been unavailable since at least Februaary.

We’re mostly back up and running — Finally — by changing Hosting Companies.

“What happened?” you ask.

Well, we got hacked. Somebody (many somebodies?) got into our sites and planted hundreds of malware files and entries into files.

We got notified by our Host that our account was suspended. We had a couple of things we had to do to get re-instated.

1. Clean all the infected files.
2. Subscribe to their security partner’s scan and clean service.

What frosted me was that the Host (of which we have been loyal customers for over 10-years) had somehow let those hackers get onto their servers.

And the solutions implied it was my fault.

Oh. And the Service that should have been in place all along, was going to cost me $70 per month — for Each of my 18 domains I host with them.

Let’s see… $70 x 18 = $1,260 – PER MONTH!

For something that should be a foundational principle of a Hosting Company.

PROTECT THE SERVERS

That was not acceptable, and they didn’t have any other solution for us. Nor did they seem to care that our businesses rely on secure hosting.

Reluctantly (there’s a ton of work involved with all our various websites) we searched for and found a replacement Hosting Company.

Our new Host is LiquidWeb, found at https://www.liquidweb.com – This not an affiliate link, so go visit them.

Their servers are secure. Added security is free. Backups are available routinely. They are reasonable and will host “unlimited” domains and files.

I liked them. I spoke on the phone with a sales guy, and signed up.

They took care of migrating all my files and databases onto their servers. They scanned our files for malware and reported findings so I could fix them. They re-scanned whenever I asked them to.

They gave me a “sandbox” to use for testing my fixes. When I was ready, they helped me get the sites publicly available.

I still have to get our email accounts migrated. That should be happening in the next week or so.

Working on all our files has been time-consuming and frustrating. Site security is one of those, “What do you mean you don’t have it?!?” specifics that should be an absolute given.

It reminds me about my traveling days in the 90s. I stayed in hotels and motels 100-200 nights a year for 10 years. “Clean Rooms” was never in doubt. Free breakfast, and King beds were acceptable to add or not have.

But.

Clean Rooms?

For Web Hosting, security is one of those.

Our Amazon business is doing fine. We’re only a skosh behind last year, but being it is Q4 and we didn’t do all that well last year, we’ll end up OK.

Enough about my challenges with websites.

I’m SO glad that Amazon has some of the best server systems – Ever!

See you in another post.
John L