Got some notifications end of last week that our website was up and down like a yoyo. Checked on it a couple of times and it seemed fine, so assumed the hosting company or monitoring company were having communications issues temporarily.
Noticed yesterday that my Discord webhook for our VOIP phones wasn’t working, so had a poke around and noticed our website was had 3000+ unique visitors over the past 12 hours. This is super unusual as our website is a glorified business card that hasn’t been updated (content wise) in 5+ years and generally gets double digit visitors a day at best. We generate basically no business through it so it’s never been a priority.
Jumped in to a shell and poked around and found some interesting looking PHP scripts, a sneaky redirect for our domain+particular parameter in the URL, and a woocommerce store installed on our hosting account selling dodgy iphones and nike sneakers.
I just nuked the whole thing and put a static index.html cause I cbf looking any further last night but still not sure why they bothered. The store itself was on our hosting, but it was redirecting sales to a Polish URL for completion. A hosting account is all of a few bucks, and all the actual illegal financial stuff was happening on another domain anyway so why bother?
I’m guessing to get around domain blocks on social media? So they can storefront from dozens of different domains but consolidated all the sales on their own service. Maybe.
Anyway the moral of my story is I’m just going to replace the website with static html. It doesn’t need any dynamic content anyway. Whats the current year method of creating a 5’ish page website of static content? Back in the day you could bust out Frontpage and make something crappy that worked but I’d like to follow modern web standards. Things like Jeckyll and Hugo but unless I’m misundertanding things they do the actual webserver functionality too?
Got some notifications end of last week that our website was up and down like a yoyo. Checked on it a couple of times and it seemed fine, so assumed the hosting company or monitoring company were having communications issues temporarily.
Noticed yesterday that my Discord webhook for our VOIP phones wasn’t working, so had a poke around and noticed our website was had 3000+ unique visitors over the past 12 hours. This is super unusual as our website is a glorified business card that hasn’t been updated (content wise) in 5+ years and generally gets double digit visitors a day at best. We generate basically no business through it so it’s never been a priority.
Jumped in to a shell and poked around and found some interesting looking PHP scripts, a sneaky redirect for our domain+particular parameter in the URL, and a woocommerce store installed on our hosting account selling dodgy iphones and nike sneakers.
I just nuked the whole thing and put a static index.html cause I cbf looking any further last night but still not sure why they bothered. The store itself was on our hosting, but it was redirecting sales to a Polish URL for completion. A hosting account is all of a few bucks, and all the actual illegal financial stuff was happening on another domain anyway so why bother?
I’m guessing to get around domain blocks on social media? So they can storefront from dozens of different domains but consolidated all the sales on their own service. Maybe.
Anyway the moral of my story is I’m just going to replace the website with static html. It doesn’t need any dynamic content anyway. Whats the current year method of creating a 5’ish page website of static content? Back in the day you could bust out Frontpage and make something crappy that worked but I’d like to follow modern web standards. Things like Jeckyll and Hugo but unless I’m misundertanding things they do the actual webserver functionality too?
I understood completely bugger all of that.
Actually I may have answered my own question - Publii looks to do what I want.
I’ll give it a whirl tonight.