If you are wondering why you haven’t received any new articles or stories from me it’s because my website had a meltdown.
Well not a meltdown exactly, but the server where my website is hosted came down with a virus around the end of September.
So… what is a server and hosting company.
Basically, a website needs a place to save all its information but if you just save it to your computer then only you have access to it.
Instead, you purchase a hosting package that you can think of as a large storage centre that is connected to the internet where they store all your files on a server for a monthly or yearly fee.
But sometimes things go wrong.
Usually, what happens is a hacker finds a backdoor or a place where the server is compromised and finds a way into the system.
Once they have access, they can make changes, such as passwords for websites and emails and take sites down or redirect them to other websites.
None of which is good.
I first found out the problem, when I went to log in to this website and I got a blank screen.
After that, I got redirected to a gaming site.
I tried to log in directly to the server which has all my websites and emails on it and I was redirected to another website from there.
So, I went over to my hosting account to let them know what had happened and they were in trouble as well.
This meant I had no way of contacting them. No email, no phone just a bunch of Cyrillic script.
After a few days without emails, I remembered that I had taken a course that recommended this hosting company and they had direct access to them.
Contacting the help desk from the course I had taken a couple of years ago they passed on the information and I would get sporadic information back.
First, the website was up and I was getting emails and then the next day it was down.
I won’t go into all the boring details, but that started at the first of the month and now it is the 18th of the month and finally, everything was restored today.
Talk about frustrating, but a little freeing as well until all the hundreds of emails arrived in my inbox.
Then they did another backup and I received all the same hundreds of emails all over again. 🙂
Did I mention that patience is not my strong suit?
But… as all this is happening, I didn’t want to download and move my websites to a new hosting account in case they still had a virus on the website that was lurking in the background.
Thank heavens I had an old backup from a previous month that could be used and then just update it with the newer posts that I had made.
Before I could make any changes, for some reason the old hosting company blocked my IP address which is like someone taking the house key. You can’t access or open the door and if you do alarms go off.
Needless to say, it was time to make a change.
Here was the process which may or may not make sense to you, but you can see it was a process:
- Purchase a year’s worth of hosting from a different company
- Go to where I purchased my domain (different company) and change the address to the new hosting site. It’s called your DNS but it’s just like when you move to a new house and your address is different.
- It can take up to 72 hours for the address change to take place. So your website is still on the old infected server during this time.
- In the meantime, on the new server, I set up my domain name and installed WordPress on it which is what makes the site look pretty.
- Email setup comes next and then you wait
- You wait until you see that your website doesn’t have any more content on it and looks quite bare
- Then… at some point in the not too distant future, your email account says your password is incorrect and this is good news
- It is good news as I changed all my passwords when I transferred over to the new server and that meant that I was at the new address
- Made the password changes and voila, started receiving emails
- Went back to the old server as it still has information on it and deleted the domains, websites and emails that were associated with it
- Back to the new server to upload the old backup that I had and restored the website
- Then add in all the posts that were missing to make the site whole again
- And that brings me to this post
Way more information than you wanted to know!
I could have made this post in a couple of paragraphs.
- Website down
- Found the problem
- Website back up again
But if I had to suffer through it I figured you might as well too. 🙂
Suffices to say, that posting will resume on my erratic and irregular schedule and soon another one will be winging its way to you.
All I can say is I’m glad the changeover is complete and life can resume its normal course of events.
