Chad Windnagle writes over at The Joomla Community Portal of his recent pain after a site of a client of his was hacked.

The short version of his story is that he was using a demo Joomla installation of his as a base template to quickly set up a new site, complete with his "must have" extensions. A new site he brought online was quickly hacked, let me quote a little of his post:

"I decided to contact my hosting company to ask them if they had been having server issues or something of that nature. “Hacked” came the word back from the help desk. How could I be hacked? The site wasn’t even live and it was unlike any other hack I had ever seen. My support technician razed me about upgrades. Upgrades? “Who has time for those?” I complained. I have over 100 Joomla! sites, 20 of which are running Joomla! 1.5 and I’m supposed to keep them all running the latest version? The answer is simple: “Yes”. "

The simple answer is an emphatic "YES". Site hacking is not that common but if it happens to you then you are entering a whole world of pain. even more so if you have no site back up.

Updates Made Easy on Ninja Hosting

When Ninja Hosting was being set up one of the things that we decided was very important was the option for our clients to have "one-click" installs of the best PHP scripts around.

For our hosting environment  there were two major providers of auto-install and auto-upgrade plugins. One of these had a clear reputation for promptly releasing upgrades and especially so with security releases.

It was a no-brainer. Security is more important on Ninja Hosting than usability but if we could give our users both options then it is definitely a win-win!! For this we chose Installatron for our customers. Bring it on!!

Update Path

Upgrades are still, ultimately the responibility of you, the user, but we make it as easy as possible for you. First of all, we will send you an e-mail to let you know there is an update available for the script(s) you ahve installed. Then all you need to do is go to your cPanel, scroll to the "Software/Services" section  and then select "Installatron".

When the Installatron window opens it will list the scripts you have installed, it will also highlight the script if an update is available. If there is an update, simply tick the box, click "upgrade" and away you go!!

 All in the upgrade will take you about 1 minute, perhaps two if you're not used to navigating around cPanel.

So, yes, you do have time for those pesky upgrades, espcially if it means you keep your site intact!