One step forward a hundred back .

byColinU

576 followers

Updated 8 years ago

I had been noticing my blog analytics stats coming up with weird page links for about 3 months and I had been informed by google of possible issues on my website for the last few weeks. Most would jump and start digging into this however everything looked normal and ranking was not being affected so .... I ignored it !

Then a few days ago i logged into my sites admin and the menu looked all wrong and I couldn't access apps or widgets. The site still looked fine just out of my control!

I was hosting on Hostgator so i contacted their support and a few hours later i got a reply saying " Hostgator no longer carries out database cleaning or virus protection" and suggesting purchasing the virus / firewall software add on , at an extra fee of course.

I looked into the small print tells you that it will not solve or clean any problems already there! So basically I was on my own!

i decided the simplest option was to pick up my bags and start again on WA as the support bit upset me enough to want/decide to move my site to WA hosting so i ftp downloaded the backup of it to allow transfer and then uploaded it to the WA hosting then contacted support to get it decompressed. Thing is it was 256mb !! Support came back and asked if it was more than one site and that I should check with Hostgator why it was so large.

I firstly looked in file manager on Hostgator and the

public_html file had loads ... and I mean loads of links /pages that weren't mine!

By looking at the date added I saw that they were being updated every day and that they weren't being added by me! As there was no real support being offered on Hostgator I opened up the Phpmyadmin section and had a look at the number of posts. I knew i had about 45 posts but php showed over 15,000 ! So after a bit of head scratching and manual post deletion I googled some bits of coding that allowed me to delete (dangerous) ---multiple posts.

So instead of doing this one by one I managed to do it in a few clicks ! Then downloaded the cleaned database ( now 12 Mb) and moved it to WA.

Moral of story - be security aware ! Now if you host here on WA password choice and access control being part of loving in here - its all done for you with nice passwords however if like me you had other places you host, my simple advice would be change simple passwords to be more secure and be careful using Ftp (use SFTP) Stay Safe Folks :)