So, I’ve had hackers all up in my server the last few days. They have kept installing malware and making file changes to my websites I host on my server. And I’ve been going through and running regular scans and fixing the things they’ve mucked up. Problem is, they somehow still had a hook in my files, so every time I would “fix” things, they would just automatically reinstall their malware.
I posted my plight to a WordPress Experts group on Facebook. I got a lot of recommendations on how to fix the problem. Everything from reinstalling WordPress fresh, including plugins and themes, to looking at the server for miscellaneous cron jobs that don’t belong, to contacting any of a number of pros for help in resolving the issue. Ultimately, I decided to take things into my own hands.
One of the suggestions I got was to get off HostGator, which is where I’ve been for the last couple of years. I was advised that HostGator is horrible host, and that I do better to get out from under the umbrella of the company that owns HostGator. Trouble is, many of the popular hosts that I know about are owned by that company and fall prey to most of the same issues that HostGator has. So, I asked for a recommendation for a new host that avoids those pitfalls.
And that’s how I ended up with MDDHosting. I purchased an account with them, and immediately I liked what I saw. It was very easy to add my domains and to install fresh WordPress software into each of those domains. The tricky part was in migrating the databases to MDD, but I’ve done such migrations so many times that I can practically do it in my sleep.
In the process of migrating to the new server, I nearly forgot to grab my the contents of my uploads folders from each site. So, starting last night and continuing on through most of this morning, I downloaded over 30,000 files from HostGator’s servers and then reuploaded those files to MDDHosting. All in the name of starting fresh with clean files that haven’t been tampered with by hackers.
Then I had to go in and reinstall all my plugins from the WordPress repository, again to make sure the files were clean and not infected with malware. This was the less strenuous part of this project, as all I had to do was search for the plugins and install/activate them. WordPress makes this process very easy, and since I’d already uploaded my databases from HostGator, all my settings were already in place and I didn’t have to reconfigure everything from scratch.
I’m still waiting for my ISP to update nameservers for one of my sites, but three of the four are now fully back online and functioning. It’s been a journey to clean everything up and get the hackers out of my sites and my server. Starting fresh with a new host will hopefully resolve this for the foreseeable future. At least I hope so. I certainly don’t want to have to go through this process all over again anytime soon.
