Back in January, the domain that hosts my store was hacked. I ended up pulling the store and the photo gallery for Brian's website.
After a month of no problems, I reinstalled the photo gallery, although I made it accessible with a login name and password. It's right there, out where everyone can see it, but you can't access the actual gallery without logging in. I didn't privatize it for people who wanted to view the pictures, I privatized it because of the crawler bots, who slammed the pages. There are ways that they should stay out, a couple of different ways to block them, but when their IP address is spoofed or they ignore the code that tells them they're not welcome, to move along and they don't, well, my options were pretty limited. I'm not talking about crawlers like googlebot or yahoo slurp, but these unknown crawlers that are searching for pages and files that never existed. They're looking for a way in.
Making that folder private has really stopped them.
I felt safe enough to try to get the store back up. I uploaded everything and it's all in place and when I go to the store, there's nothing. Just a blank page. No admin, no cart, no catalog.
So I checked out the ecommerce software that is offered by my webhost and made a choice and am in the process of getting the store back up. It looks like I only have one hundred and eleven products, so if I get a couple of them uploaded a day, it shouldn't be too long before it's up and running. And this software is one that is still supported and upgraded. My last one wasn't and safety measures weren't updated. I'll feel safe with this one.
Another fun thing to do. I have catnip to sell.....
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