Today Was a Long Day!
As many of you noticed, this morning my site was kindly taken over by a thief. This person (or computer) decided to change the email for my login with WordPress and essentially lock me out of my site. I woke up, fed the boys breakfast, went to check my email to get directions for the events of the day, and checked my Facebook account. One of my readers had emailed me telling me my site was hacked. I pulled it up and it indeed was! Of course, I didn’t discover it until 20 minutes before I had to be to one of my boys’ activities. Since this has happened about 5 times in the past month, I knew how to go into the database and restore the files. Within a few minutes, I had my site back up and running. I exhaled a breath of relief and felt a sense of accomplishment.
I then went to log in at the admin screen so I could finish a post from yesterday. I received a response saying it was the incorrect password. I tried every password I could think of. I even entered my email address and then that’s when I panicked. The email address wasn’t associated with the user account. What?!!! I double-checked to make sure it was in fact the correct site I was trying to log in at. I was definitely in the right spot, so why couldn’t I get into MY site? If you need to protect your online account, try using the best password manager for Mac, and you can store various accounts.
I called a friend, who was also running out the door, and she tried to reassure me, but it didn’t work. Shoot! We had to leave now for Song Circle! I ran out the door with the boys and we went to singing time. When we got back home, I still had 45 minutes before it was time to leave for swimming lessons. I called my hosting provider. My site was live, but I couldn’t log in. The representative had me change some passwords. Great! Now my site was officially down and I couldn’t even get the login screen to come up! Plus, it was time to leave for swimming lessons! Out the door we went!
I spent approximately 2 hours on the phone trying to fix it, as well as 10 minutes crying about it. Why the tears? Well, at one point, the customer service rep told me that I would have to uninstall and then install WordPress all over again on my site. Meaning, I would have to start over from scratch unless I wrote down the several plug-ins I had installed and running on my site. It would have taken a LONG time!
For somebody who is familiar with html and site coding, this might be tedious but doable. However, I DID NOT major in computer science and am still learning about html, so to hear somebody tell me that I would have to redo everything I never did in the first place was overwhelming! I paid somebody to move my site from Blogger to WordPress because I didn’t have the time to sit down and “try” to figure everything out. And it was TOTALLY worth it!
The second customer service rep I spoke to was amazing. She sighed with empathy as soon as I told her someone had hacked my site. Then she did everything she could to help me fix it. When she said we were at a point where she couldn’t help me any further, she stopped and said, “Hang on a minute…I’ll see if I can get someone here to help us fix this.” And she did! I think she should seriously be promoted.
To all those customer service reps with my hosting company (to be named at a future point in time), you need to go through customer training AGAIN and learn to not so quickly respond with saying that “It’s a WordPress issue and we can’t help you with that!” Thank you for your help Donna! You were awesome!
P.S. All contests have been extended by 1 day since my site was down from early this morning to just this afternoon. Have fun everyone and good luck!
What a nightmare! So glad you got everything worked out!
I’m glad you are back up. What a nightmare. I hope the rest of your weekend goes awesome!!
I’m glad you got it resolved and are back up and running again! I hate when you can’t access anything…I recently switched my blog to WordPress and my own domain after Blogger decided to delete/disable my whole blog for whatever reason with no warning…and lock me out of my Google account! Not fun at all and mine isn’t anywhere near as fancy as yours!
Glad you are back GIRLY despite the stresses of your day 🙂
Who is your service provider?! I can’t believe someone was able to hack you but on the bright side you got great customer service!
I feel for you! When Google recently had their outage, my blog was one of the ones deleted! I spent the entire day in a panick and could think of nothing else! Fortunately it was only one day but it was a horrible day of stress, so I am so sorry you had to go through that! Shame on hackers! Glad you got it back and thank goodness that you got someone with good customer service skills, lately that is hard to find!
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I’m glad you were able to find someone to help you. Hackers are so mean!!
Man, that is awful! I’m glad that they were able to help you and get things back up and running.
I’m glad you got everything fixed and can breathe a sigh of relief
how terrible!! I am so glad there were some great people to help you out!
I’m a firm believer in Blogger, and that’s another reason why LOL
I’m sorry you had to go through all that just for US! THANK YOU!!
I just don’t understand hackers and spammers. They’re obviously “smart” people–why not use their brain power to some constructive end, instead of this kind of thing? I’m glad it’s all worked out now–hope today is a lot calmer for you!!
Yikes. I’m so glad you got it straightened out. Service these days has been down the toilet. It’s so frustrating.
Holy crap….My heart just SANK when reading that!
Seriously, I’m SO glad that you got it fixed and up and running again without having to do everything from scratch.
That’s a bloggers worst fear come true >.<
"Customer service" (if you can really call it that) no matter where it is these days needs to re-learn what their job is intended to do! Thank goodness there are those few decent people who still know what the job is about.
That is a lousy day! I am so scared to switch to WordPress because I don’t know that much about HTML and blogger helps me do what I need to do. I’m glad you were able to find someone who was able to help you. I completely agree that customer service supervisors really need to retrain their people on how to help people and especially how to TALK to people.
Hope you don’t have this problem again, any time soon!
Wow, that must have been some day. I’m just glad that everything is back to normal & your site is up and running!