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I have a friend whose small business WordPress site has been hacked due to a plugin vulnerability. I don’t have any of the specifics, and she is not technical at all, so leaves everything to the hosting service (a small company itself). She did not install this plugin herself obviously.
Bottom line, they admit that recovering the site to functionality is beyond their expertise and have asked her to pay $275 for someone else to fix it.
Seems to me, that should be something they eat as part of the cost of doing business.
Thoughts/opinions?
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Depends on what agreement / contract was in place. Unless there was a maintenance contract in place, then it’s up to the owner to look after their site.
$275 sounds pretty cheap to get your business back.
Tell them to get a plugin to backup their site to an off site backup so when it gets hacked again hopefully they’ll just be able to restore a backup.
The server had no backups? Most hosting companies keep backups. They’ll probably charge a fee, but it’s probably worth it. If you know when it happened, revert to the day before and then update the plugin. I’d install WordFence, too, because once a site gets hacked, it tends to get bombarded for a while.
Let her move to shopify please. As much as i love woocommerce, if you are not tech savvy, and even your hosting is not, these hacking accidents will happen again and again.
There should be some sort of SLA/contract in place to clarify if the host updates the site software, and what happens if the site gets hacked/defaced.
That being said, most hosting companies consider fixing/recovering sites after a hacking event as out of scope, and $275 is pretty reasonable.
Moving forward make sure all site passwords are strong, and use a tool like updraft plus to automatically create multiple backups that can be quickly and easily restored to undo unauthorized changes.
275$ is a lot for a fuk up that i never caused. Learning about hosting and large hosting companies have made it as simple as possible that anybody can mess around with their service for a few days and learn its is not rocket science it will be cheaper in the long run if your friend gets her own shared server. Hostinger is a great choice and they have auto backups daily/weekly. 3.99/13.99 , the 3.99 per-month plan is the first purchase offer they give you even with the fully price its less than 200 bucks which is a lot cheaper than paying 275 to fix something i never broke. If someones running a business online the least your should do is learn about the basics of how websites work dont need to be an expert just basics like how to host a website and in sites like hostinger its basically a few clicks at most.
I fix hacked sites. I don’t want to add more about my rates and stuff because people will think I am answering just to get work. I really want to offer some advice…
First, hosts usually do not do a good job fixing hacks, and they are all about selling you Securi or Code Guard and other worthless products that just don’t work.
The most important thing is to make regular backups so if you are ever hacked, you can restore to a clean backup and fix the vulnerability. Install the Wordfence plugin and scan at least every week. That will help a lot.
You can get a good maintenance person or just do it yourself but always login and run updates.
I feel bad for your situation. I highly suggest you get a good helper to clean the site, a real pro. Check Fiverr pros or something, and don’t pay some small host to do something outside their specialization.
Best of luck to you.