Something weird happened over the weekend—one of my client's websites was hacked. To make matters worse, all of the files on the web server were erased. In my 11 years of developing websites, that has never happened… It was a new site, so we had a pretty recent backup of our own, but just imagine…

On Friday, I spent about an hour and a half making updates to the website, so I know for a fact before the weekend, everything was good. Like I usually do, I made a backup of the site with Akeeba Backup, but I didn't download the file to my hard drive, because I felt confident it was safe on the web server.

Big mistake!!!

In the past several days, I have exchanged a number of emails with the hosting company who didn't take responsibility for their server being hacked—instead, they pointed fingers at us for not choosing good passwords…

So why am I sharing this very embarrassing, hard lesson with you? To warn you to be proactive, make regular backups, and download backup files to your own server (e.g., computer). You need to protect yourself from evil hackers looking to do your business harm.