Before I trashed my old website and replaced it with the current better one, I noticed that someone had managed to insert a link on the home page to a Chinese site full of shit. The person who inserted the link had broken into the server hosting my website and altered my home page. I don't know when this alteration happened because the offending link was at the bottom of the home page and I didn't see it until probably way after it was inserted. Actually, probably no one except the attacker saw it and clicked on it before I found it.

I wasn't happy that some creep had altered my home page, but my hosting provider has a very good security team, and that team figured out how to prevent a similar attack from happening again. One advantage of a static site like mine is that I can leave site security to experts. If I find that the security experts working for my hosting provider aren't good enough, it is a simple matter to switch to another hosting provider.

If my site is attacked again, all I have to do is to trash the site and upload it again using the master files stored on my computer. This process takes only a few minutes. My site is static hence it uses no database that can be corrupted by an attack. Restoring a database corrupted by an attack is a pain that requires much more time than a few minutes and frequently doesn't work.

Static websites do not meet the needs of everyone, but they meet mine. I love the fact that I can work on my site while offline, that I can maintain it with version control software (Git), and that I don't have to worry about trying and failing to restore a database when the site is attacked.

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Author: Flower Snark
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