God, I Hate Wordpress
Dec 3, 2024
Tags: development wordpress blog
I have a personal website that I run for my business which, up until about 2 months ago, I’ve hosted on AWS. At some point in 2014 my website, which had always suffered some issues and outages when it was on Dreamhost, finally got hacked, and it got hacked hard. Some kind of ISIS sympathy and/or recruitment group hacked my site once and for all, I only learned this had happened after a client had called and asked me what was going on. It was like out of a movie, complete with out of place animated gifs just to punctuate their mission. I have a screenshot of it on some website somewhere, I wonder if the way back machine has a snapshot of that?
So I learned how to deploy a website on a micro instance of AWS and built a new, bigger, better website. I also took the time to completely redesign my entire brand. It was very satisfying, actually and I’m glad I took the time to do it. But for whatever reason that micro instance was costing me anywhere between 30-40 bucks a month! And I don’t know why! It’s a pretty low-lift website. It runs on wordpress but was really just 3 pages, a home page, an about page and a gallery page.
In the hopes of being efficient and to save a little money, I decided to migrate my website to the hosting that Catrena’s website was on (also wordpress, also just a few galleries and a small blog). That website was always going down but I thought it was because i wasn’t paying attention to it. So in April or May of this year I migrated my domain, rebuilt mine and her site … on hostgator. I don’t know if you know this or not but HostGator is like the worst host on the internet. They suck. They are just like… the worst. Bad service, up-charges for everything, its very bad. I don’t remember why but we like, inherited this hosting. I think a friend of hers had set this up years ago and since it was paid for in advance, I figured we should just use it.
Come November (the 9th to be exact), i get a down detector email at 2am telling me that both of our website were down. Long story short, malware on BOTH the sites caused some major issues with .htaccess and all the sites permissions, and her site was spared, mine was completely erased. I’m now in the process of getting her website backed up, I’m going to use UPDRAFT, as well as scanning for malware and closing up some security holes. For that task I’m using GOTMLS.net.
I really should just rebuild my professional website with Hugo, it doesn’t need to do a lot! I now have 3 whole galleries and an about page. And I don’t update it all that often! I don’t know if i’ll do that because I like my theme and my site is cool and unique, so I just need to make sure to keep backups regularly and monitor problems as they arise.
