So. Hello again. For the full story of why we went offline, see this G&T post - it's the same for both sites. Have a read if it if you haven't already, and then come back here. (Short version: we're now clean of viruses, and it wasn't our fault.) But whilst I used that post to complain about our hosting company did wrong - what about what we did wrong?

You wouldn't think there would be anything. After all, the problem was with the server itself, not with our account. We didn't cause the problem. It's Hosting Unlimited who are at fault here. Which is true. But actually, there's one fundamental thing I've learnt through this whole situation: Heed. Virus. Warnings.

We've been having reports of people getting virus warnings from NTS for a while. But when I FTPed in, I couldn't find anything - so I just assumed it was a false positive. But there's the problem - the word "assumed". It's not a helpful word to use in connection with any kind of virus issue. As soon as I'd heard that there were problems, we should have yanked the site and not put it back online until I knew what was causing them. Simple as that.

As a secondary issue, all I did to take the site "offline" was replace the front page here with a holding page. In retrospect this was dumb - the holding page was also injected with the exploit code, so what good did it do? Besides, anyone getting into the site via other means - a bookmarked permalink, or an archive page - just got straight into the site anyway. This was just dumb - especially once I knew there was a problem with viruses, I should have yanked the entire site properly. This is just stupid.

So, despite how irritating this whole event has been, I have actually learnt something. You never know quite how to deal with viruses on your site until you're actually confronted with them. This is especially true if you can't even see any evidence of them anywhere - either on your own computer, or via FTP. But if people are saying there's a problem - more than likely there's a problem. I should have been more on my guard. But I'll know for next time.

Now - can anyone recommend me a good hosting company to replace the fucking awful Hosting Unlimited? I need to be able to sell on webspace, so they need to offer a reseller account of some sort...