Automate Your Business

Archive for the ‘Warnings’ Category

I thought I was just getting old, and the spammers had cottoned onto the fact. (I turned 40 a couple of months ago).

But no, apparently Aweber was hacked, and email addresses were stolen.

Fortunately, I use a unique email for each list I’m on, so it’s easy to identify the list I should be on, re-subscribe using the new address, and consign the old address to the deletion queue.

But for a while there, I was being buried by an absolute avalanche of mail every time I checked my email on my mobile phone. It only summarises up to 99 mails unread, and every time I looked at it, I saw “99+”. I then logged in, deleted them all, and 30 minutes later there was another “99+” visible.

You can imagine my delight at this…

Here’s a sneaky one to watch for. After just announcing that my “early discount announcement” list was discountinued, and updating the page to remove the subscription form, I had someone immediately join the list.

I did some digging around, found their referrer, and they’d gone to Google’s cache of the site.

Naughty person.

So, if ever you need to make sure no-one can join a list, download something, take advantage of an offer etc, because they were didn’t react quick enough to your emails or blog posts, make sure you check the cache and disable the offer from that as well.

[James - that was clever, so I'll let you off, you naughty boy!]

A customer emailed me recently to say that someone (he says his host, but admits it might have been him, by accident) had deleted the backups from his server in order to save space. Fortunately, there was nothing wrong with his site(s), just that he was left with no backup to restore in case of future problems.

Realising that it’s a bit of a risk having no backups, he wisely went on to purchase the Cpanel Auto Domain Backup script that I sell. Which means that not only will he have backups made overnight, but he’ll have them both within Cpanel and also FTPed to another location. Ideally this will be a different physical location, so if his host server farm goes up in flames, his backups are safe somewhere else. Don’t laugh – similar things have happened to me.

Are you exposed to a similar risk? If so, take a moment to review the backup software.

I’m on the Rhodes brothers’ mailing lists, because they have some great products available. But they’ve just sent this update on their business:

Our main web server crashed…

Yesterday at 10:53AM EST our web sites suffered
a major meltdown. We lost just about everything
on our server, including our blogs, memberships,
opt in pages, download pages, and more.

** Ouch! **

We have some backups but not enough for a full
restore. And, we just found out that some of our
local backups are corrupt too.

Don’t be one of the people that this happens to. Make sure you are backing your websites (or to put it more strongly, make sure you are backing up your business). And not just the webpages – also the databases, the email accounts, the hosting configuration, and everything else that you do within Cpanel.

And every so often, make a backup, and then restore it immediately, just to make sure the backups are not corrupt. I had this problem too, so I personally know how you go from heartache (”someone’s hacked my sites”) to relief (”I’ve got the backup from yesterday”) to confusion (”Dear support: why won’t my backup restore?”) back to double heartache (”Dear customer: your backups were corrupt”).

Start backing up. Now.

Do not upgrade to v2.134 (which is only available as a manual download, I think). It’s got a problem where it will randomly lose details including your page layout (graphics, sizes, etc). And there’s no easy way to restore just one site from a backup.