Although I am undoubtedly an innocent person abroad, I never thought anyone would bother hacking my blogs because they were interesting. Unfortunately, hackers consider even the most minor sites and individuals fair game.
Some of my blogs were compromised a few weeks ago, which was a significant setback for my article marketing profession as I utilize some of them as landing pages for my articles.
I must admit that although I adore WordPress, there is an extremely high learning curve for someone unfamiliar with “all this technical ftp stuff” despite what “they” told me about how simple it was for a newbie to get started with WordPress. ,,,,,,,,,,, and,
But, just as I started to believe I had mastered the core concepts and established roughly ten sites with some modest online revenue, disaster struck, and I managed to have several compromised within a week. Please don’t ask how or why it occurred; I’m not even sure I understand what went wrong, but as warning signals from Google began to arrive one after another, I realized that…
My blog has been hacked; help!
I was initially not too worried because I had backups of every one of my blogs, of course. s not just a little………………….
How could I possibly be that wrong? As I read the instructions on the “restore blog” help page, I felt depressed. That was so confusing that I couldn’t help but think I would require a master’s in information technology (to me, as a newbie).
Although everyone there was quite compassionate when I asked on the WordPress forums, their solutions were generally out of my league. A few clicks can take me an hour to figure out for them.
I wondered what would happen next as I was horrified that I couldn’t figure out how to restore from the backups. My son, who works in IT but has no experience with WordPress, suggested that I contact the three different hosting firms responsible for my blogs and inquire about their capacity to restore my backups and remove the hacking.
This is where an intriguing discrepancy developed. Without even using my backups, the first business, Hostgator, brought me back online in a matter of days with all hacks eliminated. Well done to them; I have no idea how they managed it.
My second hosting provider, Hostica, was also very accommodating and tolerant of my issues and misconceptions, and they re-installed the sites using the backups of my blog.
Unfortunately, although my material remained unharmed, I had lost all my blog customizations, and plug-in settings – which I gather is something “everyone” knows happens when you restore or migrate WordPress sites. Well, everyone except for me! Therefore, to get back to my pre-hack state, I still had a lot of work to do. I believe I lost a lot of the “tweaks” I made without recording them since, while taking backups, I never anticipated losing all of my settings.
Despite having access to (a) a backup from the plugin and (b) files I had ftp-ed onto my PC as an additional form of backup, a third firm, which I will not name, has still (a whole month later) not been able to recover my site. To put this in perspective, within 15 minutes of receiving the plugin backup from me, Hostica had my site’s content (but not its settings) recovered.
So, all but one of my websites are back online and attempting to regain any trust they once had with Google, etc., after six incredibly fruitless weeks!
Keeping WordPress blogs from being hacked and recovering from them
So what lessons can I draw from this catastrophe for other beginners?
1) Your hosting company’s support is essential. I had fantastic service from Hostgator and Hostica, and I will keep using them for my hosting needs. Even though Company Three has been a disaster, other people seem to have had positive things to say about them online. Make your conclusions based on that.
2) Ideally, your hosting provider will regularly back up your website so they can restore it for you if needed. Nonetheless, having your backup in case the hosting provider fails is still a good idea. (Unlikely if you initially select a reliable business.)
3) Changing your WordPress admin user from “admin” to something more obscure, using an incredibly complex password that includes special characters, and changing your profile so that your first name is displayed instead of your user name are additional suggestions to stop such hacking before it happens.
4) You should also ensure that all of your plug-ins are up to date, that you are running the most recent version of WordPress, and that you do not publicly make this information available.
I picked up these and other advice from the free plug-in WP-Security Admin Tools, which I strongly advise you to use right away because it will show you any security flaws that need to be fixed.
The best part is that I discovered a tool that enables me to quickly create a full copy of my blog and recover everything—including content, plug-ins, themes, and images—even to an empty domain for situations like moving my site to a different server.
I could have quickly restored my sites from clean, compressed backups, like those I now have on my PC, if I had used this low-cost application before they were compromised.
If I become unsatisfied with my webhost in the future, switching to a brand-new firm with these copies would be simple.
This is also the right tool if I merely want to copy an empty customized blog to start a new one with the same configuration. The backup feature is promoted as a secondary function, despite being its primary purpose.
With Hostgator, the tool’s setup was straightforward. The first time I tried to set it up with Hostica, it didn’t work, but the publishers worked with me to find and fix the problems with the database settings, so everything is working again.
They provided yet another outstanding example of help from their team.
Finally, I urge anyone—new or experienced—concerned about how to back up and secure their WordPress blog to use this program. You’ll spare yourself hours of pain and heartache.
Watch a video at the link below to discover more about its other features.
WPTwin can help you back up your blog.
Online information publisher Joy Healey is pursuing a new career to augment her small pension. She writes on various complementary therapies, such as migraine treatment, stress relief, and hair mineral analysis. Includes article marketing, Internet publication, and some more exciting topics!
Visit her website for article marketing:
Read also: The way to Determine Who to Hire To Become Your Next Ideal Web Creator
