Client Support

About a week ago, one of my recent client sites got hacked. After I received the client’s notification, I checked out the site immediately. I couldn’t find any obvious code so I reinstalled WordPress, but that didn’t do it. I immediately called Lunarpages, which is the host I recommended to my client, and luckily my client did purchase the Premium Restore Service for $1.50 a month. A few hours later, the site was restored and it was back in business. I went in and changed all of the passwords for him. The previous ones were so weak that it was so easy to crack.

Lesson learned: Please, please make your password strong and purchase a restore service. Again, Lunarpages rocks.

A few days ago while I am spending time with my family, a really long time client contacted me to get me to help him upgrade MySQL 4 to 5 because his hosting provider is no longer supporting MySQL 4. When I logged into his WordPress admin, he was still using WordPress 2.7. The reason was that his host was still on PHP4 and MySQL 4.

My first task was to create a brand new MySQL 5 and then imported MySQL 4 over. The only problem was that the Vietnamese character was all messed up when I import via UTF8. It took me awhile to figure out that I needed to import Latin1. After the import was successful, I upgraded PHP 4 to PHP 5.4. I then upgraded WordPress from 2.7 to 3.52. He’s now able to upgrade WordPress automatically with just one click. I really hope that he’ll do it in the future.

Lesson learned: If your site is running on WordPress, please, please upgrade whenever you see the new version available. 99.9% of the time, it would upgrade successfully. This is one of WordPress’s awesome features.