I’m Back! (& What Happened?)

As many of my readers noticed, SuiGenerisBrewing.com was down for over a week. Over 200 (!) of you reached out to me with suggestions, offers of help, and general best wishes. I couldn’t reply to you all, but I did read each and every message and I appreciate all of the support.

But what the hell happened?

I run this site through a web provider who has a pretty nice system – they backup all accounts, nightly, to a separate physical server. I have access to 3-4 months of backups, allowing me to easily restore (or roll-back) my site. On more than once occasion I’ve messed up the CSS or database for suigenerisbrewing.com, and without anyone being aware, fixed it by rolling back the site to the previous day’s version.

So you can imagine my surprize when I started receiving notices that my site was down.

It took a while for the details to come out, and some details are still unknown. It turns out that while on-site backups are great, they’re not impervious to people with nefarious goals.

Malfeasance Overcomes Good Design

Apparently, in addition to hosting sites, my provider also sells hosting space to resellers. These resellers can then sell (& virtually host) sites for third parties. I’m not sure why you’d do that, but it is what it is. Anyway, these resellers get greater access to the servers than simple people like me. And one reseller thought it would be a good idea to reimage all of the servers operated by my webhost, including the backup servers.

Reimaging being a fancy way of saying “replacing everything on the server with a previously stored version”. Which, in this case, appears to have been an image of a blank server.

Why they would do this is unknown. But a criminal complaint has been filed against them – which makes me think that all of this was likely deliberate.

Ironically, I do keep local backups of everything – but you cannot restore from backup when the server itself is inoperable.

Any way’s, brewing posts will hopefully follow in a few days. In the mean-time, host a pint or two for the computer wonks who put all the pieces back together.