How to recover from a WordPress hack

brettHas your WordPress installation been hacked, resulting in not being able to access the menu items in wp-admin? Here are some simple steps to help you replace the WordPress core files, so you can regain control.

1. You are going to need a copy of the WordPress core files. These can be downloaded from WordPress.com here;https://wordpress.org/download/ .

2. You are also going to need an ftp program if you do not already have one. I recommend using the free ftp software Filezilla which can be downloaded here; https://filezilla-project.org/download.php?type=server

3. The first thing you are going to want to do is make a backup of your WordPress site. Do this by FTPing into your website, using the URL as the location, and logging in by providing your Username and Password. If you do not know this, contact your ISP to assist you with that information. Once completed locate your WordPress installation and proceed to download a copy to your machine so that you have a backup.

4. Now you are going to want to decompress the file you downloaded from WordPress to a folder that is easy for you to locate. Often for this I’ll use the desktop to keep this folder, but the choice is ultimately yours.

5. Using your ftp client, copy the contents of the folder you just created so that it overwrites the files you have on the server. When this is completed check your installation to make sure you have proper control of the site, and that all of your content is in tact.

Now for many people who aren’t used to seeing how files are organized on a web server, this is going to seem complicated. If this is case for you, then I highly recommend that you contact your ISP or administrator to assist you. There are also many tutorials covering this topic on Facebook and the web in general. It’s always a good idea to take a look at a few tutorials to gain a better understanding of the process before attempting this yourself. My last bit of advice, is to reiterate step 3, ALWAYS MAKE A BACKUP before changing files on the web server. This way, should something go wrong, you will at the very least have something to provide to the support staff at your ISP when you seek help.

High Speed Web announces partnership with Cloudflare

brettHow CloudFlare increases speed and security of your site

This is a guest post written and contributed by CloudFlare. CloudFlare makes it easy for any site to be as fast and secure as the Internet giants.

CloudFlare, a web performance and security company, is excited to announce our partnership with Hostigtaion! If you haven’t heard about CloudFlare before, our value proposition is simple: we’ll make any website twice as fast and protect it from a broad range of web threats.

We power more than 400 billion monthly page views – more than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga, AOL, Apple, Bing, eBay, PayPal and Instagram combined – and over 1.2 billion monthly users regularly pass through our network. We’re really glad High Speed Web has partnered with CloudFlare.

Faster web performance

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SSH and PowerShell

brettSo last night I was doing a bit of work, and kept having to switch between PuTTY and PowerShell to accomplish the task. This is a pretty normal procedure however it annoyed me that PowerShell lacks SSH ability natively. I did quite a bit of reading on the topic and decided that installing a bunch of libraries so that I could write a script that allowed for a similar function was just as annoying. That’s when I found an app called Plink which is made by the same fine people who make PuTTY. You can download Plink for free here; http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html . Now to make this useful, I put plink.exe in the same folder as my other PowerShell scripts in c:\ps . Then I made a new script using the Windows PowerShell ISE to make a very basic script that opens Plink.exe with the -ssh switch and the IP of the machine I am making the SSH connection to. This is a copy of that script;

cd c:\ps
& “.\Plink.exe” -ssh IPAdressGoesHere

I saved the script as linux.ps1 and then proceeded to create an alias that runs this script when I enter the alias name “linux”

set-alias linux c:\ps\linux.ps1

Now when I run the command linux, an ssh session opens directly to my vps, at the login prompt.

Quick Clean and easy websites for business or personal use with WordPress

 

brettSo you’ve got a business and you want to have a presence on the internet. Even if the site is for nothing more than to show your contact information and maybe your logo. Maybe you also fell in love with how Microsoft FrontPage let you create your site using WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) tools, but find that more and more, that hosting providers no longer support FrontPage. You should try a hosting account with WordPress! WordPress in regards to hosting accounts is most often found in the softaculous suite of tools in CPanel. It was originally designed to give the normal user, a way to easily set up a blog, but has evolved to be much more powerful and flexible. Today WordPress is being used by many to build all types of websites and blogs. It can be used to build anything from an ecommerce site to a family photo album. There are tons of freely available themes to work with, and if you are a developer, it can shorten your time to delivery while preserving your ability to edit and or create the underlying code. Here at High Speed Web, all of our shared hosting accounts offer CPanel and WordPress by default. And if you have a dedicated server or VPS, CPanel can be added to your server to provide you this option.

More information about High Speed Web’s Shared Hosting can be found here; https://billing.highspeedweb.net/cart.php?gid=20

 

What is Website Hosting?

In our travels over the internet we run across the question “what is website hosting?” quite often. This is an attempt to clear up that confusion and to also define the working components of a hosted website.  Let me start by separating two terms used in conjunction with hosting, those being Domain and Website. First we have the Domain or Domain name. Domains are your .com .net .org etc address that you give to people when you want them to visit your site. Our Domain is www.highspeedweb.net for example.  When you sign up for a domain, whether you see it initially or not, that domain is pointed to the DNS servers of the hosting provider you’ve chosen.  DNS acts like a GPS, in that, when you put www.highspeedweb.net in your browser, DNS hears the request and directs your browser to the location of the hosting provider. This is now where the Website hosting comes into play. Your hosting provider stores a copy of your website on a server, so that when someone types www.highspeedweb.net into their browser the website itself is displayed. The Website is the actual text document containing the code that makes up your website. So to be very specific, website hosting, is the service your purchase to store and display your website. While the Domain name is the address you give to others whom you wish to have visit your site.

 

 

Studying for the CCNA? Here are some useful cheat sheets for pros and students alike.

As mentioned in other posts on this site, I’ve been working on my CCNA certification. Now it’s no secret that this is a difficult test, and while there are many tools out there that will help you study and prepare, the simple fact that you are going to have to know the material inside and out can be daunting. It is for this reason that I’m always hunting for a better way to break down the information.  Click the link after the break.

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