Just over a week ago I’d published an article, went to bed and enjoyed the peace that only comes when everything seems to be good. The next morning I awoke to discover that two things had happened in a perfect storm.
The first was that my personal server had been hacked and with laser precision all of my websites, backups, configuration files and system had been eradicated. Trust me when I say that I had a LOT of protections in place but seriously, this was like a guided missile.
The second thing that happened was that the primary hard drive in my server began to fail. I say began to because sometimes it was there and sometimes it wasn’t. I have a second physical hard disk in my server that I keep all my backups on and that was working just fine except this was hit by the hackers.
Some people have asked me about offsite backups and I answer this in two ways. It’s a personal server….and have you ever had to restore a 500 Gig backup over the wire from your home? It will take about 3 weeks just to transmit the data. Needless to say, I’m exploring “other options”.
So what was the end result of all of this? I lost everything on my blog from about February onwards. I would like to apologise to all of you that have signed up and have to do so again…..sorry about that. I would like to appeal to anyone that has any of the articles on either the “Domain Association” OR “Selling high value domains” as I would love to get them back up as I think that they were really ground breaking.
So what else have I done? I’ve reworked the site, updated the look and feel and I’m in the process of adding a lot more features. Despite the amount of work involved I’ve had a lot of fun rebuilding Whizzbang’s blog from scratch. I’ve also enjoyed learning about security, setting mail servers, database integrity, apache and PHP configurations. There’s nothing like getting your hands back on the tools. :-)
So thank-you to everyone that has been patient with me over the past ten days. If you notice anything not working then please let me know. In particular I would like to thank all of the sponsors. Each of you have been outstanding in your support.
Right now, I think that I’m going to take a rest and get back to finishing my science fiction novel…..it’s up to the fifth rewrite!