A couple of weeks ago, I went to log into to my hosting and was having problems.  So I tried to look at one of my sites that I had on the account and this black screen came up with a message saying "This site has been hacked".

It had a whole bunch of other freaky things that it said on there.  So I decided to look at some of the other sites that I have hosted there and sure enough, pretty much all of my sites were victims of this annoying prank.  So I contacted the hosting company and they explained to me that all of their clients' sites were experiencing the same problem.  I asked them to do a restore from a backup but they said that wouldn't help because the backup was after the hack.  I asked them if they do incremental backups.  I'd be willing to go back a few weeks or even a month if necessary but apparently, they don't do that.  They only do the one backup.

This goes to show you that anything can happen at any time in this business and a plan has to be in place to make sure that you can recover quickly.  I know have monitoring software in place that will not only alert me if changes have been made without my knowledge but will also restore it to its original form.  I also have a secondary hosting company that I copied all the files onto in case I need to quickly switch over (my Godaddy accounts propagate in a matter of minutes most of the time).  The only drawback to this approach is you have to keep duplicate copies of each of your sites at both hosting companies.

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One of the sites that had been hacked is called http://www.stealthtravel.com.  I have revamped that site and that is now up and running.

Enjoy!