My second website - raised from the dead
New Years resolution
For those of you that do not know, I have decided to start online marketing once again on the 2nd of January 2019 after I have given up on online marketing for 4 years due to being hacked and in the process I pretty much lost everything.
I still however own some of the domain names and that is why `I am referring to it as raising my websites from the dead lol.
Accomplishments in a month and a bit
It has now been about a month and a halve since I re-built my embroidery computerised software site from scratch and three days ago I decided to raise my second website from the dead and I am very happy to announce that the website has just gone live, although of course there is still a lot of work to be done on the site and the content creation phase is only now beginning.
Why I am excited about the second site
The site I created is a free online marketing training site and it is also a product review site that focuses mostly on reviewing and recommending online marketing tools that really works. Further to this the name of the site lends itself towards making it possible to also do product reviews in general on hot and trendy products that is not related to online marketing.
This site therefore is perfect for creating product reviews for my niches and also perfect to build backlinks and to do general promotion for my other websites.
I am very excited about this website because I was really looking for a way to promote WA and Jaaxy and now the opportunity has finally arrived.
Lessons to learn
1) Someone once said: "What does not kill you, makes you stronger". I could have so easily given up on online marketing for good, never to return after hackers destroyed all of my hard work which I have built up over many years. Yet, who knows, the greatest might be yet to come. I have spoken to someone on WA just the other day that told me that he had to start over from scratch three times due to hackers and this did not hold him back and today he has massive success online. So the message is: "Do not give up and do not let anything stand in your way from achieving massive success online".
2) You already possess what it takes and you can do it! If others can do it, then so can you. Also do not underestimate yourself in what it is that you can achieve. I am looking back at how much I have accomplished since I started online marketing again on the 2nd of January and when I look at all the work that has gone into my websites already while holding down a full time job, then I realise how determined I am to be successful, because this is not normal for me lol. So the question is, how determined are you to be successful? Luckily we have the WA community to keep us motivated and to keep us accountable.
3) Do remember that what you sow you will reap. It might be a lot of hard work right now, but when the harvest comes in, guess who will be smiling :)
Wishing you all the very best of success here on WA!
Ps. I just wanted to inspire some of you that a lot can be achieved within a very short period of time if you put your mind to it. Remember: You already possess what it takes to be super successful!
Kind regards
Schalk
Recent Comments
43
Great post, very inspirational. I am myself coming back to two sites which I have neglected for some time like yourself. For sure it requires a lot of work but as in most things in life if you don’t put they effort in you will not get the rewards you are looking for. Wishing us both success.
Well done for getting your second website running, I wish you success and a hacker free future with it.
Your words will provide inspiration and encouragement to many, including me.
Thank you for sharing,
Steve.
Thanks so much Steve for your continued encouragement and your kind words. It is much appreciated! And I am glad that you could find some inspiration from the post. Wishing you the ver best here on WA!
Thanks Danny. I am not hosting with WA but I have now taken precautions and believe things will now be as safe as it can be and I will stay on top of things. You will see my explanation below that I did not have a handle at the time on things due to broken unsupported plugins that made me to give up at the time even before the hacking took place lol.
I think WA will never let hackers step in and destroy, steal everything here. Maybe you did not have the best website host when it happened to you in the past.
Is it not the Web Host's responsibility to protect all the websites it hosts?
Nope, it is not the web host who is responsible to stop hackers. And any site can be hacked. Look at what happened PlayStation and Microsoft. Their servers were actually shut down by hackers. All I can suggest is that you save your work and check your site regularly.
Well yes it is true that the same guys that hacked me, managed to hack Air France as well lol. So it made me feel slightly better. However my cousin is a computer programmer and he told me the fact that my plugins were broken and so outdated caused vulnerabilities that could be easily exploited by hackers and that is what he believes to be the main cause of me being hacked.
So why was some of my plugins broken and not updated you may ask? Well I have explained this in previous posts that I have learned a very valuable and expensive lesson. I bought WP plugins that worked awesome at the time from platforms like JvZoo and Warrior Plus, but no one ever told me that they will stop supporting their plugins after a couple of years. I ended up having around 35 websites at some point (which is way too many anyways lol) but yes imagine that these plugins were used all over all of my articles and pages over all of my vast amount of websites.
And then some years later all of these plugins started breaking and not supported anymore so there was nothing I could do. I did not know where to begin to fix all of the vast issues all accross my vast number of websites. So I left it for a while in that state as got incredibly busy at work and then the hacking happened on top of that.
This is the reason for the creation of the new site to help others learn from my experience and not make the same mistakes I did and also to protect others from shiny object syndrome because I bought plugins and stuff that was not needed and wasted way too much money on stuff like that I could have gone without.
Now my solution is to only invest in one trusted premium WP theme that contains all the plugins that I could ever need and this reputable company updates and supports their plugins year after year and will do so in the foreseeable future.
The organisation that hacked me so by the way was a very well known terrorist organisation to make matters worse lol and they replaced the index files of my websites so that whenever you would type in the url of my websites then their home page would come up instead. These were random hackings in order to spread their propaganda. As a result some of my sites got black listed as well as it was now used for terrorist propaganda lol. Well as mentioned it made me feel better that Air France also got hacked by them, so was asking myself if it would have made a difference if my plugins were all updated etc. Who knows lol?
Luckily my cousin could help sort out stuff for me, but yes took him a long time and a lot of hard work to help fix this very big mess lol.
Well yes I was with Hostgator at the time and not sure if I had the best protection due to being on a reasonably cheap plan. Saying that, not sure if being on a cheaper plan would compromises safety at all, probs not, I don't know lol. I think for Hostgator's own protection probs not.
As explained below though the reason for the hacking my cousin believes is due to unsupported and broken plugins that caused vulnerabilities. Saying that Air France got hacked by the same guys lol, so I don't know if it would have made a difference.
I now host with my cousin on his private server and he takes care of any security issues for me and we are making use of Cloudflare which I think is pretty awesome for extra protection and also allows me free https.
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Thanks for sharing, work even harder!
Your most welcome! Wishing you the very best here on WA!
Appreciated.