Phoenix From Hacked Ashes: My New Author's Website
Yesterday, I hit my various social media accounts (Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and Facebook) with the news that I had a new author’s website, which can be found at jonnynexus.com.
This isn’t my first rodeo when it comes to an author’s website. After a few years using my Livejournal home page as pseudo-site called “Planet Jonny”, I went to a hosting company back in 2007 and paid for virtual hosting and the jonny nexus dot com domain. Their system has wizards that allow you to install a Word Press website and then configure it.
In 2007, this was a sensible thing to do.
In 2024, it’s a really, really stupid thing to do.
I’m not going to name who the hosting company is because they’ve always given me excellent support and it’s not their fault that the services they offer are no longer suitable for a person like me.
Because this is the modern Internet and we can’t have nice things. The problem is that any Word Press site will now be under constant assault by bots looking to find any weakness they can crack, and if/when they do, they’ll install a bunch of malware on the site. It’s not personal. They’re not hacking you, just using your site for their purposes. The only defence is constant updating of the software and skilled configuring of the software / setup to harden it.
Turns out, I didn’t have the skills to do the latter nor the energy — given that this was just a static website — to do the former. But it was fine up until a few years ago, when it got hacked. The hosting company’s scanning tools detected the malware and took my site down, telling me that they wouldn’t bring it back up until I got rid of the malware. I figured out how to use the scanning tools built into their dashboard and deleted it all, and they put the site back up.
Then it got hacked again, and not just my jonny nexus site but my wild jester press site and the site I’d set up for my wife. This time, I paid them several hundred pounds to get rid of the malware and harden the sites.
Then they got hacked for a third time. So all three sites were down, plus Critical Miss which was on the same host. So in desperation, I just deleted the three sites completely. I managed to partially retrieve my blog posts (the texts but not the images) from backups, and put them onto a temporary site.
I think this was a couple of years ago now. I was too depressed to summon up the energy to do something about it. I concentrated on the periphery, on trying to manage my way through the ever-shifted social media landscape and to get a newsletter going (both of which efforts were complicated by Nazis and Nazi-sympathisers).
But it meant that at this point I was paying quite a bit of money just for mine and my wife’s email accounts (on our custom domains) and to have Critical Miss hosted. (But at some point between then and now, Critical Miss stopped working too).
I know there are worse things in the world, but it does make me angry. I had a really nice looking site (I’d revamped it around 2014) which I was really proud of, and it got destroyed because of bastards.
It reminds me a bit of what happened to the bowling club in Feltham, near where I live. (For Americans reading this, this is outdoor bowls on manicured lawns, not ten pin bowling).
Their bowling green got vandalised (for no reason other than bored kids getting pleasure from causing misery for other people). Turf gashed, ripped up, etc. They put a lot of time and effort into repairing it only for it to get vandalised again. Again they repaired it, and again the vandals destroyed it. Eventually, the old boys who ran the club realised that the local kids simply weren’t going to allow them to pursue their hobby, and gave up. The club folded. No more bowling.
I find this terribly sad.
As I said, this is why we can’t have nice things.
There’s a streak of cruelty in a lot of people. I see a lot of posts on my local Facebook group that essentially amount to, “Relax! Chill! I used to beat up weaker kids when I was young, never did me any harm!”
Not sure where I’m going with this… :)
Anyhow, I went to Wix, where you are not hosting your own software — instead it’s a bit like creating a Facebook page except you get to extensively customise its look and feel. The good thing is that you can create the website first on a temporary URL, and only when you are happy that it can do what you need do you have to sign up to a monthly fee.
Having done that I was able to port my custom domain over, which was a little fiddly, but not horribly so, and then sign to the email package, to replace the last bit of my old hosting that I was actually using (getting the email working was a bit involved, but I did eventually figure it out).
Interestingly enough, Wix don’t do the email. It’s done via Google. Probably because as part of the whole “we can’t have nice things anymore”, I understand that in today’s spam-filled hellscape, running an email server is really, really hard. (It’s not just because of the spam, mind, there’s a lot of big tech wankery in there too — here’s a really good blog post by a bloke who eventually gave up trying to run his own email server after twenty three years).
Anyhow, the good news is that I really do like my new website. And it’s nice to know that keeping it safe from hackers is someone else’s problem.
Oh, and if you spot any typos, please let me know!
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