Panic over. This site, and all my email accounts, are now happily swimming along on a new hosting account with Laughing Squid Hosting. If you need me, I'm back on tom@thisdomain.com.
Also, an added bonus: I get two spare MySQL databases to play with, so expect some pointless new tools to appear online shortly.
Update – my main email account is working again. After two email outages in a month, though, I'm moving my web and email hosting to a new company, so this website may disappear offline for a few hours at some point as it transfers.
– Original Post:
If you're trying to email me then please use my work address. With brilliant timing, Fasthosts' email service decided to fail for the second time in recent weeks right after the company took £63 from my credit card for hosting services.
I tried to upgrade to WordPress 2.6, but the only result was a completely broken website – nothing on the WordPress upgrade page, and nothing appearing from index.php. That's progress for you – maybe they introduced a "pointless drivel" filter that decided to delete the whole thing and have done with it.
I've restored to a backup of WP 2.5 and everything seems OK, but please let me know if you spot oddness.
This evening I discovered that the old front page of this site, which contained a couple of links to other content held on my server, had been hacked. Not particularly badly – some evil person had managed to edit index.html and add some links to extremely dodgy porn sites at the very bottom of the page. The good news: these links weren't visible. The bad news: because they weren't visible, I hadn't noticed them. Google's cache suggests they've been on the page since at least the 8th of November.
Obviously, I don't know how this happened. It could be something to do with the Fasthosts hacking incident – I received an email from the firm telling me to change all my passwords, which I did as soon as possible – or maybe one of my PHP scripts, or a PHP library, was vulnerable. In any case, it's a pain. I've now changed my passwords, again, erased all the sites running from this server, blanked the SQL databases and reinstalled WordPress. What fun.
So – hopefully I'll have time to reinstate some of the content from the old site in the near future. I'll also put the old CSS design, or something like it, back as soon as I can convert it to a WordPress theme. For the meantime, though, this is it.