And We’re Back …

Sorry about the delay in postings around here.  Last week, Thursday to be exact, we had a bit of an issue with our server.  I have had a MediaTemple Dedicated Virtual Server for over a year now and have been pretty pleased.  Anyway, Thursday afternoon I got a direct twitter message from one of the people I host on the server saying it seemed to be down.  I logged in form the MediaTemple iPhone interface, which is pretty cool by the way, and gave the server a reboot and figured this would clear things up.

When I got back home I checked only to find that we were still having issues. At that point I called to open a trouble ticket.  A bit later I checked back on the ticket status to find a note from the admin that I am sure nobody wants to see, we had been hacked.  He recommended I reinstall the virtual environment.  My firts thought, “What about all the data?”.  Now I am very good about backups, or so I thought.  I was doing backups on the domain level on all domains I was hosting.  However, I came to find one flaw of the system is I was leaving the backups on the server and when the VE was screwed up and needed reinstalled those backups went bye bye …. so sad. 

Anyway, I went to reinstall the virtual environment and was happy to see that during the process the old data (ie all the files and datasbases form the domains I host) would be moved to a folder called “old” so I would still be able to access it.  However, after reinstalling the VE, I was terrified to see there was no “old” folder, meaning no old data … uh oh.  I gave the support number a call asking about this and I got the erie silence on the other end.  Thats about the point my stomach hit bottom, I am sure you all have had that feeling.  After some looking around, I finally found the old data.

So I took Friday off and have spent the next couple of days over the weekend reconstructing all those web sites.  Painful, yet a good lesson.  And now I will be sure to keep those backups in a couple of places for peace of mind.  It sucks how sometimes we need a scare to make our vulnerabilities visible to us.

Now that it is all over, I should be back on the blogging horse and thank you all for your patience !

Oh yeah one last thing, BACKUPS people BACKUPS !!