Some of you may have noticed that this blog has been down for a long time, roughly 60 hours. I thank all of you that emailed me asking what happened and supporting me through this frustrating downtime. So what caused this downtime? There was a security breach in my hosting provider’s core system, and all the data was wiped out. All gone, without any backup or trace. And worst of all it’s not just me — all the other hundreds of clients have the same issue. All the VPS instances were wiped out. By who? I don’t know. For those who did it, you have done very well.
Why did it take so long? Well, it is a long story. The CEO of the hosting provider didn’t answer any tickets nor made any announcement regarding the issue. They kept their clients in the dark, including me. So while waiting for an answer, I followed the thread on WJunction, where most of the clients bought services from this forum. Why did I have to wait? Because I don’t have any backups (how stupid of me >.<) — my last backup was on the wiped-out server as well; it’s all gone. And on my local hard drive I still had the last backup which is 3 months old.
In the frustration time, I thought about how I could get my backup, which was impossible to get from the provider. And fortunately, Google had cached my pages. Thanks Google. So I copied and pasted all the last 3 months of data from the Google cache, bought a new hosting server, and moved all my data. It took me a while to recover almost 90 articles from the last 3 months.
Anyway, now my blog is back online with recoverable data (some data may be lost), and I’m quite happy now.
Lesson of the day: Back up early, back up regularly. You don’t know how valuable your data is until you lose it! And always remember — shit happens!