Those of you who tried to visit Blue Cord this past weekend may have noticed we were having a few problems here. The problems were caused by a chain of events:

  1. My domain got hacked.
  2. The server at my hosting company crashed.
  3. My plane from Minneapolis to Waterloo had mechanical problems.

O.K., technically this third problem didn’t affect my site, but it did mean I had to spend the night in Minneapolis where I was unable to correct the first two problems. I had been in Massachusetts for the weekend to visit my kids.

The hack occurred on Saturday night. It was not a malicious attack. They did not destroy any of my data. Instead, they merely left web pages that bragged about how they were able to hack into any site. (It’s a shame they aren’t able to brag about making a positive contribution to society, but that is a different matter.) So, I spent Saturday night trying to track down all the files they had installed and reinstalling the files they had deleted. I wasn’t able to finish the job before taking off Sunday afternoon to fly back to Iowa.

Sunday evening, however, that whole problem became moot, because the server at my hosting company crashed. It was apparently unrelated to the hacking of my site, as the company said the kernel on this particular machine had become corrupted. It took them until late this afternoon to get the server restored. Fortunately for me, their last backup was done sometime between my last blog post on Friday and the hack on Saturday. So, I am now back up and running with no loss of data, and I didn ‘t need to hassle with my own backup files.

I apologize to those of you who have had to go for two days without Blue Cord. I know how rough that can be. Fortunately, the hosting company I use is a good one. This is the first time anything like this has happened to my site in the two years I have been with them, and they had the problem resolved quickly. If anyone is looking for a good hosting company, I can recommend these guys (www.bluehost.com).

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