If you happened to notice this blog go ‘off air’ and stop being updated recently, it’s because my blog was hacked.

As I came to update it one day I noticed that it was riddled with spam posts – and I mean really awful stuff.

I reached out to my hosting company – let’s call them BadHost – and they apologized and cleaned it up. OK, I suppose these things can happen, although I’m not sure how, with a good hosting company.

History: In my very early days of blogging, before I knew any better, I went for a cheap, shared hosting company and my blog was hacked appallingly. As it happened the blog itself was pretty grim, and no great loss to the blogging world, but I did learn never to skimp on hosting again. (Oh and when I asked CheapHost to recover my blog from a backup, they discovered they’d forgotten to make backups. Sigh.)

So you’d think I would have learned my lesson – and I had. As my main blog grew older and more established there was too much work at stake to risk losing everything. Finally I realized that paying for good quality hosting, and with helpful support, was essential. I moved my blog to Wealthy Affiliate hosting and, although it’s not the cheapest, it comes with a ton of other benefits, such as training, AI, and best of all a red-hot support team.

Everything was good and I became a happy blogger again. (Using my ‘other’ blog=> JoyHealey.com)

So How Was This Blog Hacked?

Because I was a self-taught blogger, I decided it was time to learn blogging properly, and to start a blog on a topic of interest, rather than just in the ‘Make Money Online’ niche. That other blog is about insomnia: SleeplessZone.com – again rather neglected at the moment because of this hacking saga.

Part of this particular course was to develop two blogs, compare progress, and then choose the one that was doing the best.

Where it started to fall apart was that the course recommended a new hosting company BadHost who would set up the blog configuration to work with the course (OR there was a huge set of instructions to show us how to do it ourselves). I selected the Done-for-You option, which was only $18 a month, and trusted the course administrator that BadHost was a reliable hosting company. What a mistake, and a surprise because the course tutor is actually a well-respected name. For the moment I’ll assume he was duped too, because one of the blogs was fine, ‘only’ one was hacked.

All went well for a couple of months, then one day I discovered all this spam inside my blog. BadHost cleaned it up for me and I assumed that was the end of it.

Not so. A second hacking, just a month later.

Again BadHost cleaned it up.

Now anyone else would probably have moved away at this point, but blogging is a part-time side-hustle for me and I was particularly busy with my off-line business at the time so I had had to let the blogging course go by the wayside.

The THIRD Time My Blog Was Hacked

Once my offline work calmed down I came to restart the course and discovered that this blog was again horribly hacked. I sent screenshots to BadHost’s support desk but by now they had stopped responding to my tickets. (The support had never been good – they were always trying to shift the requests onto the course’s support desk – even when I knew it should be BadHost’s responsibility.)

So, after checking that the ‘course configuration’ would run on Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting, I decided to move my two new blogs back to Wealthy Affiliate, where I had spare capacity that I was paying for but not using. (It’s a very generous package.)

That’s where the nightmare compounded. In theory, Wealthy Affiliate should be able to drop in a special plugin, make their own backup, load it onto their own servers, I point the nameservers to WA, and all is well.

Not so fast. BadHost blocked Wealthy Affiliate’s plugin, making it non-straight-forward to move.

To cut a very long story short, what should have been an afternoon’s work to transfer from BadHost to Wealthy Affiliate took 3 days, AND, bless their hearts, a FORTY-SIX message long support ticket with WA while they helped me through technical steps I had no idea how to perform.

Moral of The Hacked Blog Story

Never skimp on hosting and support. Wealthy Affiliate were amazing and I highly recommend them. Click =>HERE to take a free trial and see everything that’s included.

Incidentally, one good thing that came out of it was that I discovered tons of new features had been introduced within my ‘plan’ that I’d been paying for but not using. Including the ability to generate a few posts, and article outlines, using AI. Although I prefer to create my own posts normally, I’d lost so much time that I confess I did a few top up posts to plug the gaps.

Anyway – if you’re ready to try quality blog hosting, training, support AND a friendly, helpful blogging community, check out what’s on offer by taking a trial, free, starter membership with => Wealthy Affiliate.