Alvin Phang‘s blog got hacked when he was upgrading to WordPress 2.5.1.
It took him about a day to be online like before, where using my affordable web hosting I am online again cleaned from all malicious software in less than an hour.
But Alvin’s question is: WordPress 2.5.1 Should You Upgrade?
To answer this question: look at the picture below and give your honest first impression:
Even without knowing what the whole idea is all about, you spot that "stuff for sale here" is quite odd compared with all the seemingly sophisticated other concepts.
A similar approach is needed when you make money online. You need to ask youself:
are your components and efforts in sinc or
is there a noticeable weakest link that should be upgraded/improved upon?
If you hardly have any visitors, then chance is small hackers will be interested in your site, so which version of WordPress you are using shouldn’t be your biggest concern. Even if you get hacked and your site goes down, you won’t notice it when your earnings are little anyway.
But when you have a well visited site like Alvin’s, you should consider to change your webhost from the cheapest of the cheapest Hostgator to any affordable web hosting. Why?
- because a decent webhost won’t shut your site down once your traffic spikes (Hostgator will because they oversell what they have: bandwidth needs to be paid!!!)
- a decent webhost cannot afford that their client is down for the whole day, so they will work with you to make sure you and they are happy and your site will be online ASAP.
So if you are serious about making money online, check out if your tools are in sinc:
- your webhost : mine is always in sinc because that’s the deal me and my web host agreed upon: If I get more visitors using more bandwidth means I opt for a bigger package quick and easy.
- your computer
- your Internet connection
- your knowledge (if you don’t know how to monetize a blog, then don’t spend money on anything else but knowledge first!)
- your efforts
- your software tools (and only now we consider Alvin’s question: WP2.3 or 2.5.1?)
Make sure yourself, your tools and your partners are in sinc when you are serious in making money online! Things that are below standards of the rest, need to be upgraded first!