Wow, I can’t believe how stupid some people are. Why do you want to break into MY website?
Apparently hacking into WordPress based websites is the latest thing. Over the last several months, WordPress websites around the world have been targeted by these thieves. I recently dealt with this on approximately 25 websites. They got it and planted THOUSANDS of their own files within my file structure pointing to their own eCommerce websites. Using MY hosting, MY bandwidth all for their own. Thieves. Much of the problem with my hosting provider occurred simply because of the amount of ATTEMPTS. It was easy to stop the intrusions into the websites, not so easy to stop them from ATTEMPTING. The attempts themselves is what can overload a server CPU.
As I said, I’m not the only one. This has occurred around the globe, so there was plenty of help to be found thanks to Google, FB and forums, since WordPress is used to create 58.6% of all Content Management System websites (blogs and user manageable websites). That also means that WordPress is used to manage 24.9% of ALL websites. ALL websites.
My host provider was not of much help… at first. They kept telling me my CPU usage of their server was too great and at least twice my account was suspended and ALL of my websites were down. This was unacceptable as some clients rely greatly on their websites for business purposes. They kept telling me that for $34.95 PER MONTH, they could have someone assist me in cleaning up the websites and applying security. No thanks, I can do this myself.
I won’t go into details, but after MANY late hours I finally got .htaccess files applied correctly and a great security plugin configured for all websites.
After going through the sites and adding security in MANY different ways, the hosting provider finally helped out by adding a CAPTCHA to my directories. I was grateful for that because I did not have access to do that myself on that level. But too late. Even though I just renewed my hosting with them in July for the next three years, I found a new host that cares a bit more and does lots of the background security without me having to deal with it. A bit more expensive, but far less than the monthly fee plus the additional $34.95 the old host wanted to do less.
Lots of headaches over. Still finalizing getting all the websites moved over, but each has been successful so far.
Along with this move, I have implemented upstairsroom.COM as my main website, while keeping upstairsroom.NET as an alias instead of the other way around. This helps to keep any established search engine entries working.