If you’re looking for the Slacker Health site, you’re out of luck. The site is experiencing massive technical problems and is currently out of commission.
The technical problems started a few weeks ago. Suddenly out of the blue, I stopped being able to login to the site. At the time, I didn’t think too much about it. I was busy on other things and figured I had mistyped my username or password.
The site has a limited login attempts feature, so I locked myself out after a few tries. This happened again after a few more unsuccessful attempts. And for some reason, when I tried resetting my password, I also kept getting an error.
At this point, I started searching online for ways to recover a lost login.
More time passes and I’m still locked out. I’m still not overly worried as I haven’t been doing any real promotion so there’s almost no traffic to the site yet.
Eventually, I exhaust my DIY options and reach out to hosting support. I spent an hour on the phone with support trying to diagnose the technical problems. During this time, I discover that somehow my admin login has been deleted. And for some reason unknown to me, support is unable to create a new admin login.
It also turns out that there are numerous structural issues with the site. I had originally built the site on a different domain and apparently did not correctly transfer it over. This has created other technical problems.
I could only spend so much time on the phone and after hanging up with support, I received the following message:
Thank you for contacting us.
It is very important for us to answer all your questions quickly and to your satisfaction.
You can try to install a new fresh website and replace the wp-content and wp-includes in order for your website to have the same content.
As suggested, I attempted to reinstall the site but as of yet, I have not been successful getting the site back up and running.
The scariest thing about this whole situation is that even though I have backups of the site, I still cannot get the site live again. I’m not even sure what went wrong although I have a few thoughts. But with that said, the Slacker Health site doesn’t have much content yet. I can probably rebuild without too much effort.
The Financial Slacker site is another matter. With over 150 articles posted, it would be pretty depressing to lose all that work. Again, the site is backed up regularly but if similar technical problems where to happen, I’m not sure how the site would respond.
Readers, I would be interested to hear from other site owners about how they protect the content on their site from technical problems or other potential issues.
I hate it when things go wrong like this especially when it turns out to be a complicated fix. I’m surprised that your host hasn’t been more helpful getting it fixed. I made some back-end changes to my site a few weeks ago and it went offline as a result but a call to my host and they talked me through what to do to get it online again.
I take a weekly automatic backup of my site that sends the files to Dropbox. I haven’t had to do a restore yet, touch wood, but I’m hoping it won’t be too difficult if I do. There’s plenty of free and paid backup plugins for WordPress out there. I use Updraft plus and the free version seems to do the job perfectly.
I have had a number of issues that have taken the site offline – usually when I make a bad change to the function.php file. And in the past, I’ve been able to make the fixes myself. So initially, I stayed away from asking for help. That was probably not too smart.
I do have the backups available so it should just be a matter of getting everything in the right place.
And I agree that my host should be more helpful.
Good luck with your other site.
I am quite lazy and use WordPress.com… There are some downside issues and no technical worries…
There is something to be said for no technical worries. But I actually enjoy the technical aspects too much to give up that part.
Seriously, sounds like you need to drop your hosting service. Or at least post which service you went with so we know what to avoid in the future! 😉 I would say back-up back-up back-up, and as long as you have your database and .php files you should be able to upload anything you might need.
It seems like you might have gotten hacked, though I really don’t know much about such things. I use the Jetpack plug-in to “protect” my site, and so far I haven’t had any issues. Do you have some sort of “malicious log in attacker” blocker? Might be something worth looking into. Sorry this happened, I know how much I hate it when I have small technical issues!
I hear you. I going to give the hosting company another chance as I’ve been using them for 10+ years without a problem. But I’m not too happy at the moment.
I do think the site was hacked or at least heavily spammed. That’s one of the reasons why I’m not a fan of adding commenters and other subscribers as users. I would rather maintain those in a separate application.
And I do have backups of the content. I just need to figure out how to get that content back up and running. There are a few other structural changes that I’m doing at the same time and that’s part of the problem.