This is a short post to share the challenges that I have had with my websites – most importantly Develop Great Managers. I was hacked. The hack installed malware that not only impacted the site but blocked me from logging into my WordPress console.
As a bit of background, the Develop Great Managers website has over 70 blog posts and another 36 interview posts. The interviews were started before the podcast was created, so some are written interview summaries and the rest are brief summaries of the podcasts. Note that each interview typically resulted in two podcasts, the first was a discussion with the interviewee on an area of deep expertise, and the second was about their career journey.
Develop Great Managers was hosted on Bluehost. This is a good inexpensive hosting company where I had five different sites. I have always been happy with Bluehost until ALL of my sites were hacked. I did not get any notification from Bluehost. I only found it when I tried to login to the WordPress console for my sites. The login failed. This was typically due to a corrupted .htaccess file. Bluehost was often able to make changes to this file so that I could login. I installed plugins to help clean up the site but was unable to fully rid them of the malware.
I finally decided I had to move these sites to another hosting company. I decided on SiteGround. They appear to be more focused on security. I was able to move one of the sites that only had limited malware. SiteGround immediately identified that the site had malware and I was able to address the problems. In the case of my other sites, I have had to recreate them from scratch, scraping content from the running website, in order to move them.
I have moved two of my sites. I am in the process of moving one more. And I have one left. This has been amazingly time-consuming. I would estimate that it has taken me 50 hours just for Develop Great Managers, to produce a result that is nearly as good as the original.
Why did I spend the time on this? It is because I believe the content is useful. Google Analytics support this. I have users come to the site and listen to my podcasts on a daily or weekly basis. I am proud of what I have created and want it to be there for current and future managers.
Please continue to enjoy the blog posts, interviews, and podcasts!!
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