Website down, Mails bouncing back - what had happened to Jaisiyaram.com?

You cannot imagine how happy I was yesterday and am today to see our website working. How happy I am that you are able to read these lines! Our website is back up. If you are a regular reader, I know you were missing reading my blog with your morning coffee or at your daily computer-session. And I can tell you, I was missing it very much, too! Let me tell you about our technical disaster that started one week ago.

We were attacked. Not physically but virtually. Not our body took harm but our website did! Actually, it was our server that the attacker hacked into and where he placed a script that started sending out spam mails. We were notified and immediately informed our server administrators who shut down the possibility of spam being sent – obviously something had broken the security measures which were previously in place to prevent such a thing!

What followed in order to make sure our server is secure of further attacks was like a nightmare. The server administrators took off our server. It had to be done, it was a question of security. At first we thought it would take hours only – those hours stretched into days and all we could think of was what people would say if they tried to open the website during that time! There would just be an error – Website not found! Whoever would send an email would get his mail right back into his inbox – bounced. People who had booked retreats and wanted to come to the Ashram would panic – how would they reach us now?

I don’t know if you can imagine the extent of this downtime for us. You can compare it to losing your mobile phone with all your numbers on it and all you have left is an unplugged landline phone with dial plate.

It is a very strange feeling to sit in front of the computer in such a situation, waiting for a message by the server administrators, hoping they would say it was done or at least that they were about to finish. We usually spend quite some time working at the computer and in the past days we spent even more time – but had the feeling that we achieved nothing at all! It is frustrating when there is nothing you can do – either because you don’t have enough technical knowledge to do or because there is no way you can change anything!

We wrote to the server administrators who were watching codes scanning and restoring our files, we talked to them on phone, we used normal webmail to send short notifications to those people whom we expected to write to us and we called our developer, asking for any possibility to get our website back up. When we had just come up with an alternative and temporary solution – another server onto which we would upload our backup – the server administrators finally told us that they had found a way to do it more quickly.

And slowly, bit by bit, our website came back up. There was some text, now the colours, refreshing again brought the photos up and finally it was back in its full shape. Wow, was that relieving! We still had lots to do, mails had to be sent again, the missed diary entries had to be put up and we had to ensure that the server was actually secure now. But whatever we were doing from that moment on felt just easy. It was a joy sitting in front of the screen again, seeing our website and reading mails again.

Yes, now we know that we have to work on a backup plan so that this story will never repeat itself. We are sorry if we missed your mail. Please resend it, we would love to read from you. And most of all thank you for having checked our website whether it is up again. Here we are, again connected with the world.