A client called me today saying their custom website I built for them is down. It just shows a 403 error now. They said they just wanted to update the prices. I asked what changes they made before it crashed. She said, "I couldn't figure out how to change the prices, so I just installed Wordpress, and now it doesn't work!" They completely deleted the entire website using cPanel and replaced it with a partially installed Wordpress.🤦

Time to test the backups.

That is … wow

Fantastic that people that dumb have money they can give to you 😄🤭🍷

Sucks to be you, hope you charge them for the emergency and weekend hours.

Being stupid should hurt, so they learn a lesson to never do it again.

Was it a static site?

@hardCoding It's a static site generated from JS with some JSON config files for the prices. I'm supposed to be the one who changes prices for them as part of the ongoing maintenance, but for some reason their receptionist decided to do it this time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

LOL!

Well good thing for you in this case it's enreitly out of your hands. If the person who installed was your main contact person you might kick yourself for not being clear enough about dos and don'ts but when it's a new employee it's not your responsibility.

If they start groaning about "why did our receptionist have these privileges?" you can always point to other instances where "if they didn't you would've had to contact me and pay quite a lot every time you wanted to change X"

In my experience companies who don't understand tech are very quick to drastically Change their opinion from "everyone must have full access" to "How on earth could everyone have full access?" and you must remind them why they chose the level they did.

I hope that there were backups in place fam, that way if you fix it would be

easy.....peasy

ooooooooooooooooooOH

I hope that there were backups in place fam, that way if you fix it would be

easy.....peasy

ooooooooooooooooooOH

@ezpz lol wat?

You should totally charge them full price for the site now.

So that client is just a normal client doing nothing out of the ordinary.

@CeladonCookie it's not a backup if it's on the same server

"I didn't know how to change prices, so I installed WP" - please what?!
This train of thought is beyond me

oh wow.

"i couldn't figure out how to move this one stone so i just launched a nuke at the city and now the city is gone!"

@packy @Midnight-shcode those are exactly my thoughts, too

Not knowing something or doing something stupid like I updated some unknown file and rebooted the system to see if it takes effect is ok. But this one is beyond ridiculous

This is where you want to make sure your terms & conditions are all in order and covering what happens in the event they start fucking around in cpanel and fuck everything up. Not sure why they even needed cpanel access given the scope of the site as you describe 🤷

@Inigo cPanel was provided by GoDaddy when they bought the domain. It was there long before I came along. I deployed the site using FTP since it was already set up. I'm going to transfer the domain out of GoDaddy and use Docker for deployment after this.

@Demolishun whats fucking backups mate, we had not even requirements for 2 years after PM was fired lol