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I've been asked if there's anything can be done to guard against this happening again.
In this specific attack, yes. The underlying vulnerability (which was the hosting platform itself) has been patched.
However it's impossible to protect against everything as new exploits are found every day.
I have a robust backup strategy that lets me recover the site in around 12-16hrs to a new server with the loss of, at most, a day worth of posts. Going forward I hope to reduce the time to recover, and the data loss range. This strategy will be tested very shortly when there will be an outage to move the site back to the original hardware.
Tenths doesn't make any money and is entirely funded by myself. To provision the temporary server it's currently running on will cost around £100/month for 6 months (minimum contract) in addition to the normal £150/month hosting bill.
It's always possible to build in more resilience, have multiple servers on multiple locations, or move the whole lot to cloud based infrastructure such as AWS but the money isn't there.
Follow up question:
"What about putting advertising back?"
Well, at the point the advertising was removed it was generating about a tenth (ironically!) of the monthly hosting bill. I figured if I was paying 90% anyway then the extra wasn't going to bankrupt me and you folks could have an increasingly rare thing.... A popular website without adverts.
So unfortunately there may be occasionally outages when major things happen.
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