Hacked or bad hosting ??

[jay275]

I checked my site this morning and my whole database was gone, just the shell of the site was showing. After yelling a long string of obscenities, I checked my cpanel account and what happened was somehow my DB user account was gone. Just vanished. After recreating it, the site is back up. I contacted my host and they couldn't tell me why this happened. Has anyone ever heard of this happening before?

[David]

Mind if I ask who your host is?

[anon]

w0w! sorry to hear about that jay.

this is one of the many reasons to *always* make backups.
it can never be stressed enough, and yet, so many people still do not do it.

i'm sure the lesson has been learned and you'll practice backing things up now.

i'm pretty certain a good majority of us have been burned before. (i'm guilty :p)

[webjunkie]

jay275 As the owner of a couple dozen retail ISP's and a wholesale ISP provider, we suffer attacks daily on our MYSQL, I have seen these attacks bring down server and ever corrupt the database so it appears to be gone. If you use a virtual host as most small companies or single domains, you may never know why it happened. In my case I can see the attacks in my server logs and can block them, which I have a tech check several times a day. Plus do a daily back up to a different sever. Since you most likely do not have multi able servers you best option it to run backs ups and save the file to your home computer. If you host is only half way decent the back up can be done by a cron job, then you just have to remember to download it every so often, this way you have 2 copies of the back up.

[Kevuk2k]

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I'm gutted for you mate, there are lots of times that my servers have gone down and even my cpanels are innaccesible until I restart the servers, Are you on a dedicated server? Do you use a VPS account? Do you have a Webhost manager program installed on the server? Backups apart, (Always do that, and I bet you did?) a server failure should not have resulted in the loss of a mysql database. If this happens next time, have a look at whether you have total control of the server, that way you should be abe to restart without loss.

What I think has happened is that even though it appeared you had lost the databases they simply needed to be restarted, most good hosts will have the individual functions below in place for emergencies and each can be restarted as a seperate entity, I know that if I had not had these on my servers then I would have lost my stuff also.

Restart Services
Mail Server (Exim)
DNS/Name Server (BIND)
FTP Server (ProFTPd)
SQL Server (MySQL)
SSH Server (OpenSSH)
HTTP/Web Server (Apache)
POP3 Server (cppop)
IMAP Server (uwimap)
E-Commerce Server (Interchange)

All we can do mate is to hope it never happens again.

good luck,

Kev

[jay275]

Thanks for all the great info guys. I am with a smaller hosting company, on a shared hosting plan. I agree, odds are I will never find out what happened. The strange thing is how the database remained intact, but the database user account was deleted, thereby severing the link to the DB. Even before this happened I was pretty paranoid about backups, I back up probably 3x a week to my home PC, and to an external hard drive. That way I have a copy of my site in 3 places including the host. I guess this was a good reminder of why I should keep doing that.

[mikedippel]

Jay. Would it be possible to remove the validation ID requirement from your submission form? I have 18 directory websites that I would like to reciprocate links on, but the ID requirement makes it impossible. Thanks.

[clubracer]

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