Multimedia Learning

Practical Ideas for Designing Better E-Learning by David Anderson

Backing up, restoring and reinstalling GoDaddy WordPress blogs

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Restoring GoDaddy WordPress Blogs

Like many of you, my GoDaddy WordPress blogs were compromised (again) this weekend. In fact,  I found hundreds of tweeps experiencing the same issues. Unfortunately, GoDaddy’s phone support refused to acknowledge any problems and even admonished me for using weak passwords and not keeping my blog software updated.

Overall, I’ve been happy with GoDaddy. They’re inexpensive, reliable (ironic, I know) and I love the one-click installs of blogs, wikis and forums. I have three servers with GoDaddy and the same one was hit each time. This prompted me to move my sites across my other two servers.

I’m not a database expert but  GoDaddy’s online help files were easy to follow and I successfully backed up my database, restored the database and got my sites up and running.

I hope the screencasts are helpful. If you know of a more efficient way to restore the files, please let me know.

Backing up, restoring and reinstalling GoDaddy WordPress blogs:

  1. Manually checking for the “eval(base64_decode” malicious code in #GoDaddy hosted blogs
  2. How to restore your #GoDaddy blog, website to a previous date. Might not fix all issues but gets your site back up.
  3. How to backup your MySQl database using #GoDaddy hosting control panel
  4. How to remove WordPress site files using #GoDaddy hosting control center and prepare for clean install
  5. How to install WordPress using #GoDaddy hosting control center
  6. How to restore your MySQL database using #GoDaddy hosting control center

Update 5/12: GoDaddy posted new information on their site regarding today’s latest issues.

Comments

  3. Tracy Boyer says

    Thanks so much for these David! I swapped servers last weekend on Go Daddy and everything still isn’t perfect so it was nice to watch these to get a better understanding of their back-end options! Cheers, Tracy

  4. david says

    Tracy – that makes us even, then. You posted a year ago or so about a WordPress DB backup plugin that can email the db backup. I’ve been using it ever since and it helps me sleep at night:-)

  5. Joel says

    Thanks for this. I think that GoDaddy’s admin interface and help files are severely lacking – especially for folks who don’t have a technical background. I’m able to make my way around OK, but I often wonder about folks who have not technical background and the trouble they must have doing even the simplest things with the unintuitive interface and poor documentation!

  6. Michael says

    Dear David,

    My problems started on 1st September (well it’s the first time I noticed anyway). My site and blog were redirected to some malware site; I went into my root directory and found a bogus htaccess file that caused the redirects. I deleted it, but 3 hours later it was back. Changed passwords, updated all software, made sure wordpress was up to date but still it kept coming back. Over the next 3 days I tried searching for the cause all the while having to delete the htaccess file that would appear in my root director at 5 minutes past the hour every 3 or 4 hours or so. In total 15 htacces appeared in my root folder over 3 days.

    I spoke with Godaddy who said update and change passwords, but basically it’s not our problem. I deduced that after updates and password changes, with the problem still occurring it had to be an inside job, basically the problem was already inside generating this htaccess file. It was at this point, after many google searches about hacking, htacccess files, redirects etc that I stumbled across your site!

    I just wanted to say a BIG THANK YOU for this website showing how to back up, restore and re-install using godaddy as a way to clear out any infected files in wordpress. I am one of those folk with no technical knowledge at all and following your videos have saved me no end of stress. Following your instructions worked like a dream. I now have a clean up to date version of wordpress installed using your instructions and thanks to you showing me how to save MySQl database and reinstall it, my blog is back exactly as it was. FANTASTIC. Your a life saver.

    By the way did I say THANK YOU!
    🙂

    Mike

  7. mmlearning says

    Thanks, Mike! I’m glad to hear you got everything cleaned up. I didn’t realize this issue was still going around. Here’s hoping it’s not as widespread as last time.

  10. Rob says

    Admonished you for weak passwords? Ha. That’s pretty funny.

    Most programs these days require passwords complex enough to secure nuclear weapons. Next thing you know they will tell you it is your fault the site was hacked rather than help you fix it.

    Did you get any tips for securing a site out of the experience?

  11. Klag says

    Thanks a bunch! That helped a lot. 2 of my WP sites got hacked, you saved me lots of time! 🙂

    Klag