After over a week offline, the sites are finally back.
To my knowledge, the sites were not hacked and the databases have not fallen into the wrong hands, however I recommend you all change your passwords because it's just good practice. And especially, always make sure the passwords you use are unique to each site and/or service.
What happened?
On the morning of February 17, my website monitor app alerted me that the sites were offline. I put in a trouble ticket with the hosting company, thinking the sites would be back online soon as brief downtimes did not seem to be an uncommon occurrence with that particular host, and the sites were usually back up in a few minutes. The host also had their own site monitoring to alert them, and I wondered why it hadn't activated.
Over the course of the day on the 17th, I exchanged numerous messages with the tech support people who kept saying the server was undergoing maintenance and they were working with their upstream provider.
By the next day, I knew this was no ordinary maintenance, but I kept getting non-answers from the hosting company's support people, despite my demands to have the ticket escalated to someone who could tell me something. The server seemed to have just disappeared from the internet completely. We were not the only customers of that host on that server, and I found other people whose sites were also down.
On the 19th, I began asking for the sites to be put on a new server, and on the morning of the 20th, I had a message giving me the info for another server.
The server the sites were restored to was a "Frankenstein" server - they had restored the original server's files (all of them) on top of an older server which had not been updated or had anything deleted from it, so it had a mixture of old and new files, and, additionally, a mixture of 32-bit and 64-bit operating system files.
Needless to say, things were not operating as they should, but I kept trying to fix it, that is, until I determined what the problem was and knew that it was beyond repair. Tech support was no help at all.
At that point, I decided in the interest of time (since it was approaching a week's downtime) to restore the sites to the server ESMB is hosted on. They've been good for several years. I will probably move the sites away from there in the future.
We are restored back to February 15th, losing a couple of days, but since we aren't a high traffic site, I don't think there's much we lost.
Since we're on a different server with a different configuration, please let me know if you have any problems. If you need to email me, you can use my username at the same domain.com.
