Brno BVE website is down... NOT

The website will not come back up this time. At least it won't come back as you guys know it. I have been told BrnoBVE has been hacked (which is bullshit, I will explain why) and the host won't be able to anything about it.

Firstly, saying the website was back sound like a sack of shite to me. As some of you might know, I missed out on the invoice due date in September and the website went offline for a couple of days. When the hosting company received my payment, they reactivated the site. But while the site was working as usual after this reactivation, I was not able to log into the administration anymore.
1) You cannot hack a site that is offline
2) If you try to hack something, you take it down completely or put some note, ask for ransom. There was no such thing.

That leaves me thinking someone f*cked up  badly when restoring the site - either they did something with .htaccess files, or they messed up the login PHP scripts, or both. The smell of amateurism got stronger when I spoke to the support today, as they requested me to do some stuff. After that, the web went down completely.
Honestly speaking, I am very angry now. I invested quite a lot of time and effort into making that site. I did not do all that just for some wanker to come and mess it up and not even be able to admit he did it.

Plans for the future? Honestly, I don't know. Creating a new reasonable site takes a lot of time, which I don't have. Moreover, I had lots of custom CSS written for my site, as I have found out the WordPress templates are very stubborn in some cases. The custom CSS got lost.

I also cannot create a new donation button through my PayPal account, it just won't let me. No errors messages, the screen just goes blank and stays like that. The same happens with Google's AdSense; I am not able to place a new commercial. It won't show for some reason.
Nothing optimistic, really...

Oh man... What did the hosting cost? Maybe you'd consider moving to another hoster? German Strato has really fair prices, a rather usable site building WYSIWYG-style toolkit and quite good service. And you'd still be able to use a .cz domain.

I'm so sorry to hear that!
I have just been visiting your website days ago, and now it is all gone all of a sudden 

I would personally recommend you check the Internet Archive snapshots of your website. That would allow the recovery of your custom CSS (by inspecting the page source) and also hopefully the contents of some pages.

141 captures of your website has been made by WaybackMachine over the past years, so I suppose quite a few resources can be recovered.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200201202413/http://brnobve.eu/

Thank you! :-)

I am not sure ho much I will be able to recover, but it will definitely come in handy.

Everyone - please respond to the poll I have set up. :-)

I didn't cast a vote, because that should be up to you yourself, it's you who has to work with it. As long as the content is and stays back up, I'm very glad

It's absolutely frustrating to lose all the work you put in to the wrecked website. can't decide how to cast the vote  -  the previous site was perfectly good, but what's gone is gone. And the new format is only just launched, so the contents are insufficient for a fair vote, in my opinion.
I'm sorry you have to face the time-consuming task of re-building, when I'm sure there are more important things you have to do. I'd say stick with the simplest method you can find, and add to it as and when you can, that's what I'd do.  Best of luck.

Quork wrote:I didn't cast a vote, because that should be up to you yourself, it's you who has to work with it. As long as the content is and stays back up, I'm very glad

Sure, I will be the one who makes the decision in the end, but I am interested in opinions. The voting is anonymous anyway, so unless you said so, I would not know what you voted for anyway. :-)

Maybe try this to save your website if you manage to recover it from Internet Wayback Machine Archive.

I am using the wayback machine to recover some of the screenshots and other stuff. :-)

The First Brno Track section is now complete - anyone, feel free to test if everything is working and eventually let me know if you find any issues. 

Really sorry to hear your site was hacked. This might not be the best time to say this, but I usually suggest saving every bit of code in Google Drive/Dropbox/OneDrive or anything like that. I do it this way: I create a folder within the synced Google Drive folder for my project and write my code there. Then I upload the code to the website using FTP or if it's custom CSS, then on that interface. I give a straightforward name to the file so that I know later what is where. If that is better, I create a full copy of the folder / file structure locally, which also gets synced to Google Drive cloud.

Also, I regularly make backups of Wordpress sites, and I save three things:
- FTP - that is a copy of all the files I have in wp-content (including uploads, plugins, themes, child themes) and also the main .htaccess file
- SQL - I go into phpMyAdmin and export the database to have a copy
- WP export - I go into Tools in the Wordpress menu and create a Wordpress export file, which includes all posts, pages, settings, etc - everything that is cleartext. This can be imported into any Wordpress install, including Wordpress.com.

Google Drive syncs this with the cloud, so altogether I will have 3 copies of the data: on the website, on my computer and in the Google Drive cloud.

I use this strategy for routebuilding too, thus even if my computer breaks, I have a copy of my work in the cloud. I do pretty much everything important within the Google Drive folder.

Don't you happen to have an older backup of your database? Because everything else is easy to rebuild, everything else can be re-downloaded easily, and content can be reuploaded easily.

Also, if someone accessed your file system from the outside, look at the folder permissions - make sure they are not writeable to the outside world. Hopefully the host keeps their software well configured and up to date.

I'd suggest setting PHP version to 7.4, that enhances security, too.

@Phonteus Nevolius: I do have backups of the produced materials, however I have never really considered doing a backup of my css. Foolish, right? :-) Anyhow, thank you for the valuable information. :-)

@graymac: The First Brno Track section of the website is now complete, so that might give you an idea what I am planning to do. I think it is simple and clean this way...

Doesn't your host at least have a backup of your site? In my experience, hosting providers do create regular backups (though I've only worked with Hungarian ones, don't really know about other countries). A database backup should be more than enough.

Nah, their advice was to wipe everything out via ftp and reupload everything. True proffesionals. 

I see. I know you did pay your hosting fee for a year, but you might want to consider moving to a more professional hosting provider next year...

What I did with BVE Klub was to move to Wordpress.com hosting. They provide an ad supported free service, but also absolutely professional security. There were several compromises to make that way, but at least I don't have to pay and the service seems quite futureproof. They have paid plans as well which provide more functionality, but I decided not to go with them. I was looking at being futureproof, that's why I chose the ad supported free plan.

It will come together in the end.  Looks fine, what you've put back in to the site so far.
The trackwork is great. Very high detail.
I need to update the Celtic website, it hasn't been touched for nearly two years.
I use a web program called "Serif WebPlus" - which is now obsolete. I can't stand Wordpress - tried it a few years ago and it did my head in. I'm going to cut CTS back to basics, I think, simplify it and leave it as an archive (more or less).  I paid domain name  and hosting for another year, anyway.

So... how about this? A bit of css play, nothing too difficult. 
http://brnobve.eu/trains-diesel/

Really nice!

I think I'd write "Download" somewhere on the images themselves, probably in a semi transparent way, to make it more clear that the trains can be downloaded by clicking on the pictures. I know some users have trouble finding that out, even if you write how to download above the pics.

Or put the word "download" in front of Diesel Trains in the header?  I found the hyperlinks easily enough and I'm at least as stupid as the average user!! 
It look fine, nice work.

Looks nice!