Do you have a website you need to host? If you do, then you’ll find a great offer down at Nexx, where you can learn more about their Unlimited Web Hosting offer. They have a new service offering which they’re trying to promote, which consists of domain name and 12 months unlimited hosting for the pricely cost of $10.

The great thing about unlimited packages is that you don’t need to worry about hitting any limits in terms of bandwidth, space or even number of email addresses you host. They’re all included in the price of the package and you can focus on putting your site together and working on your content. Nexx even allow you to deploy a number of popular open source packages at the touch of a button. These include WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Zen Cart.

Nexx Hosting seem really confident about their service, in fact the $10 offer is meant to give you a taste of the level of service you can expect from their servers and their staff. They’re hoping that you try it out, find it awesome and decide to stay. The good thing is that $10 is really cheap, so you do ge to try out the service for a very small premium.

Oh yes, remember to use the code SPARK10 if you sign up.

So, I decided to have a play with Joomla a couple of weeks ago as one of the first websites I ever built Cruelcard needed to be moved away from my Windows host and had to be rebuilt in something other than ASP. I’ve been wanting an excuse to play with Joomla and well, here it was. I built the site, put up the plugins I wanted, themed it and lo and behold had a brand spanking new website. Everything was good .. the sun was shining etc .. until last night ..

Last night I logged in to find that the site had been defaced. I should have taken a screenshot to show you, but I just overwrite the message with a “Will be back soon” message. I left everything as it was so that I could find out exactly how the hackers broke into my site. Today I had some time, so I went through my logs and this is what I learnt:

• The hacker was from Turkey. Well, I knew that as the defacement was in Turkish but his IP address (85.110.114.98) confirmed that.
• He was specifically looking for Joomla sites to target. The first referrer I have is: http://go.mail.ru/search?&q=Powered+by+Joomla%21.+Valid+XHTML+and+CSS&no_morph=n&sf=480. You can see exactly what he was looking for, but seeing I’m on page 49, he must have gone through quite a few other sites first.
• He gained access to the site by resetting the admin password. I actually found the exploit in Milworm (possibly this one anyway). This coupled by the fact that the sequence of commands were all placed in under a minute suggests that this was a scripted attack.
• Once the admin password was changed, the hacker went straight to the admin site and did whatever he needed to do.
• The hacker also seems to have uploaded some media using the Media Manager which suggests I need a proper rebuild of the whole thing.

It was pretty interesting to follow the hacker‘s footsteps. I will need to rebuild with a newer version of the software that blocks that hole, but I am partly responsible because I didn’t change the default administrator’s name. If I had done that, I might have had a bit of protection. I’m not going to abandon Joomla just because of this but it has certainly highlighted the importance of backups to me!

If anyone’s interested, you can read through the log: cruelcardcom-hack

Note to self: Read more about Milw0rm and don’t watch so much CSI

I had an interesting today playing with Joomla, an open source content management system. Now, those who know me know that I sing high praises of WordPress, but I always believe that one should never be locked into a particular flavour of any technology, but instead be aware of what’s available on the market and what options are out there. The same applies to anyone involved in technology, being locked into a particular route can be a very dangerous thing and the increased dependence can be an issue in the future.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have one technology you can implement quicker than others. The more time you spend on something, the more expert you tend to become at it; so by all means, pick your favourite and increase your proficiency. However, never be blinded by that technology and always weigh up the alternatives. It will save you time in the long run.

If your resources are a bit tight, there’s also a number of free templates that you can make use of to build your website. Try this sites for example:

• Compass Designs – Both free and commercial Joomla templates
• SiteGround – Free templates, addons and tutorials on Joomla
• JoomlaShack – Collection of commercial and free templates for Joomla
• JumlaHut – Absolutely massive collection of Joomla templates
• TY2U – Collection of free Joomla templates

So, the choice is yours, spent $50 getting 50 templates from ClubTVK, or learn to use Google, and get as many as you want for free.