Protect your Blog!
Blogging January 10th, 2008If you tried to access ChrisBlogging this morning, you probably noticed that it was “down and out.” I was met with this surprise several hours ago, and just recently got to the bottom of the problem.
To get to the bottom of things, I first contacted BlueHost. Unfortunately, they told me that everything looked good on their end. As you can imagine, this scared me a bit because of all the blogs that have been hacked over the past few weeks.
Since I have no technical skills of my own, I was at a bit of a loss. I already noticed that my stats were suffering, and in the back of my mind I knew that some of you guys and gals were trying to access the blog. For this reason, I wanted to get things fixed sooner rather than later.
The next step I took was to get in touch with my tech guy. He helps me with everything from working out bugs to SEO and much more. After only a few minutes of rooting around, he noticed that a recent plug-in had a bug. After deactivating it, everything was restored to normal for the most part.
Although everything worked out in the end, this situation got me thinking. What would I have done if my blog was hacked beyond immediate repair? No matter who you are or how serious you are about your blog, make sure that you always back it up. This may sound time consuming and tedious, but it is well worth it.
To all my readers, sorry for the downtime this morning. Hopefully this will never happen again, but if it does, you can be rest assured that I will be working hard to figure out the problem. In the meantime, make sure that you protect your blog!
January 10th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
I’m glad it’s working. What plug in caused the issue?
I always back up my work. For those, that use WordPress there is a plug in that will back up your entire database and you can use the export features. With my new website, Addicted To Writing it doesn’t take to long however with Vegan Momma it takes a few minutes. That’s about 3 years of blogging. I write a lot.
January 10th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
I can back you up on that one. I’ve never had plugins cause those types of problems, but I did have issues with my database that required re-installing WP and using a new database. I was able to easily import my entire DB since I had a very recent backup.
January 12th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
I had an issue like that a few months ago. A plugin was activated and my site went down. It took me a while to get it going again. Thank god I got there. It can be a shcok sometimes as you have worked hard on something and then to think that it may be gone or in some kinda danger you start to worry.
At least it all worked out in the end for both of us.