I Can Do This

Today I’m rebuilding groningenrain.nl for the second time. It was hacked. There were pharmaceutical ads all over the site. Sometimes replacing the entire site from the index out; sometimes only specific posts. Sometimes entire tags were replaced.

It was ugly.

I called godaddy, my hosting provider, and they said the damage was extensive and to fix it, they’d need to sell me a consultant. Who would remove all the hacked bits, no guarantee that things could be restored because I didn’t have back up, and then there would be a daily malware scan and backup for as long as I paid for the service.

AS LONG AS I PAID.

And that’s what I found all over the internet, too.

Ah, your site’s been hacked? Here are the extensive, complicated instructions on how to fix it OR YOU COULD JUST HIRE ME.

It feels, then, that you’re making the instructions as difficult as possible so that people are intimidated into hiring you.

Or I’m just disappointed and hurt and angry because my site is hacked and I *didn’t* set up proper backups or scanning for malware in the first place.

Two days ago I see my site is hacked and yesterday I hold my breath and take the leap. I try to go into the database and the site and remove the offending bits and I COMPLETELY FUCK IT UP.

So my site WAS hacked, but now it’s just flat out GONE.

Well, fuck.

So now it’s a rebuild.

FINE.

I figure out how to uninstall wordpress and reinstall it on godaddy’s interface and finally I have a site again.

With nothing on it, but now I have a site again.

But.

You knew that ‘but’ was coming, right? You could smell it a mile away, right?

Fucking ‘but’s.

I fucked it up again.

I wanted to peek into the database again. See what it looked like so that if I was hacked again, I could better tell what was hacked and what was supposed to be there. From a fresh install.

And I managed to kill the site.

TWICE.

So I went to bed last night at midnight.

I was so upset that at one in the morning I was still awake and I have no idea how long it took me after that to fall asleep – I forced myself to stop looking at the clock.

And this morning when P got up to take care of the kids, he closed the door so that I could sleep in, but it was too late.

All I could think about was how my site was broken.

GONE.

And all those incredible stories with it. Especially the fruit stories. The pregnancy with the twins was so brutal, but at least I could write it out for therapy. And share with you. And it was beautiful. Painful, sure, but beautiful.

And I shared the story of my trauma from years ago.

It’s a lot.

It’s just a whole fucking lot.

So now I’m rebuilding AGAIN.

Cause I couldn’t sleep, so I got my happy BUT out of bed. Took the kids into daycare.

Cause I went for a run this morning.

Cause I’ve eaten.

And self soothed.

Cause it’s time to rebuild this mother fucking site. AGAIN.

Cause I will rebuild this site as many times as it takes. Cause this, too, shall pass.

Cause I can.