I Hacked My Webhost!

I didn’t even mean it! That’s how good of a hacker I am. Just kidding. I did cause my host to go down and got my account all suspended like. Cause I’m a lazy jerk.

You see this website is quite old. Currently there are posts going back to 2005. I have some backup data stretching to 2004. There were posts from earlier that are gone, lost due to a lack of backups in the way back. There have been times when I have made very frequent posts, and other points where I have made zero posts. The most recent dry spell was from June 2012 to about June 2014. It’s an interesting time frame when you think about it. Let’s just say two years. For two years it has just sat on my webhost’s server doing nothing. No posts, no checking in on the website. WordPress updates were far and few between. I started posting again in June, and started working on getting everything updated, included the site’s theme. The going was slow, maybe only a few minutes every couple of weeks.

Well one of the plug-ins I had installed had become very out of date during that time. WAY out of date. In fact I think the publisher stopped maintaining it before my last hiatus. Someone took advantage of this hole and crashed the webserver causing my host to suspend my account. Not at all what I had intended to happen. Shame on me for falling behind.

This is a valuable lesson for myself and anyone else out there running a WordPress website. Patch Patch Patch! As frequently as you can. Did that plug-in stop being maintained? Ask yourself if you need it. If you do look for an alternative that is being maintained. Migrate to it immediately. WordPress has gone way out of their way to make patching an incredibly easy process now. Most important of all don’t forget to backup!

Thankfully I was able to work with my host and we got rid of that nasty old plug-in and now everything is honky dory. I’ve done my best to speed things up for refreshing the site. Hopefully I’ll have that ready to go here soon.