February 2026 Newsletter – Part 1

The Ugly ...

I have two services that independently monitor the uptime status of TheChocolateLife. Both of these services alert me via email. When I received these emails, I forwarded them on to my developer. We were alerted of the outage within minutes of it beginning.

Reading between the lines of the update published approximately 8 hours after the incident was first reported (see below), a malicious script was uploaded to the node where my virtual server was located. That script apparently did two things: overwrote boot records and encrypted data on all the disks on the node. (Ransomware?)

At the time I took the following screenshot, it had been over four days since the incident began. Four days is a very long time on the Internet.

The Bad ...

While I did have a remote backup of the site, it was one week out of date. This means that if the content from the compromised server could not be recovered, the site would be missing posts, comments, and new member signups since the last backup.

I have been operating TheChocolateLife for more than 18 years, and this is the first time anything even close to this has happened to me. I thought I had the necessary procedures in place, but it turned out I could have – and should have – done a better job. I hope you all will accept my apologies for that oversight.

I still do not know if the data are recoverable, but I cannot wait any longer. I have been waiting for nearly three days for word from the ISP about the status of data recovery. Reading the last incident update, I have given up hope that it will be.

So, I am now moving forward, assuming that it is not.

The Good ...

I did have a backup of the site, even if it was a week out of date.

I was able to SFTP the backup (it is over 10GB) to my developer, who was able to install it, and the latest stable version of Ghost, on the same server that hosts the Forums site. A quick update to DNS records made the site available, even if it was out of date.

This is a temporary home for TheChocolateLife. In the next week or so, my developer will have chosen a new hosting services provider and the site will be moved to that new host. I do not want both sites on the same server – all my eggs in one basket is not a tenable long-term solution.

I still have not restored the lost posts; I will do this over the next couple of days. I don’t have the actual text content (I keep all the image content on a local drive), but I do know the permalink URLs (they were published on YouTube and LinkedIn), and know basically what was there, so I can reconstruct a reasonable facsimile.

Notifications of new member signups are sent to me via email, and I have added almost all of them to the member database. (One was an obvious spammer.)

The Now ...

By the end of Friday this week, I should have the site back to the state it was in before the outage at Cloudcone. While I am still going to make weekly remote backups (to a local drive), I implemented daily “local” backups at the ISP that is now hosting both TheChocolateLife and the Forums site. (I am inquiring about the location of the backups – I am hoping they are on a remote server. If not in a different data center, at least on a different VPS in a different location in the same data center.)

My developer and I are also working on is a more robust remote back strategy. Options range from running nightly backup scripts and moving the backups to a remote location (for example, my Google Drive) to mirroring the site in real time to a remote data center with the ability to automatically switch from one to the other if the main instance of the site becomes unreachable for any reason.

When a decision is reached and implemented, I will let you know.

While I was working away on these updates, I changed ad servers (formerly Revive, now AdPlugg) because I was working on page and theme template code and I was looking for a simpler, lower-cost solution.

I have been able to run ads on TheChocolateLife and the Forums site for about two years now, and I am very selective of the ads I run.

At the moment, three ads are running. One is for a classified offering clearance discounts on polycarbonate molds; another is for custom molds. The third is for Season 5 of the Craft Chocolate Challenge. (The deadline to enter is February 21st and the deadline to receive entries is February 28th.

I take your privacy seriously. The ad server I use is not a part of an ad serving network. I only serve ads I approve and that are relevant to members. I also do not accept ad server or rewrite service links. Ad server links enable the platform serving the ads to drop cookies, making it easier to track you around the Internet. Rewrite services (such as bit.ly) make it easy to change the destination of the ad after the fact without my knowing it. This could lead to a malicious site or inappropriate content, so I don’t accept them.

The Future ...

The next step is to find a new host (ISP and datacenter) for TheChocolateLife. It will NOT be at Cloudcone in any datacenter. This should not affect your ability to reach the site. When the site is up and running at the new location, the site will continue to run where it is. After changing the DNS records, you will go to one site or the other (they will be identical) until the change propagates globally. Typically, that takes less than 24 hours. When we are certain that it has happened, we will retire the temporary instance to ensure there is enough disk space and RAM to run the Forums site at peak speed.

By the end of this coming weekend, expect the regular monthly member newsletter.

In Closing ...

I appreciate your patience and continued support.