Hello ladies and gentlemen. It’s been a while since we last updated here at RefrigerantHQ and there are a few reasons for that, but I won’t get into every one. As we all know, time has a way of escaping us. I had planned on doing updates a few weeks ago but I ran into some bad luck with my website right about the same time. On August 13th the traffic to my site all but collapsed. I went from receiving thousands of visitors a day to only receiving a couple hundred. At first I thought I was just having a bad day but as the days wore on I saw that the trend was continuing. I couldn’t understand what was going on. Why was my traffic going away? Where were my readers? I began to get frustrated and walked away from the site for at least a week.
It was last weekend that I decided to take a crack at it again and figure out what happened. There had to be a reason for this. I checked Google and my other traffic sources but I was still ranked towards the top of the search results. It wasn’t Google’s fault. I then tried going to my website via my phone and that is when it dawned on me. My website had been hacked. Anyone who had clicked on my site was automatically being taken to the hacker’s site. Once I figured out what it was I became even more worried, but I also buckled down and spent a good six to seven hours over the weekend researching how to remove the code.
Come to find out the hackers gained access to my website through the RefrigerantHQ forums that I had launched at the beginning of this year. I won’t get into all of the technical details here, but long story short the hackers injected their malicious code through my forum software. I had hopes of this forum of being a go to for those of you within the industry but after seeing the damage that these hackers had done I decided the safest bet was to scrap the forums entirely.
At a later date, I may bring them back, but over the weekend I only had one concern and that was getting my site up and running again. I found all of the malicious code and deleted it from my database and also paid a security consultancy firm to review my site for anything that I have missed. I got the all clear this afternoon from them and now here I am writing this article. The site is good to go now, but just as a precaution, if you see anything out of the ordinary please let me know and I’ll get fixed as soon as I can.
Onwards and Upwards
Now that I have reclaimed my site I have quite a few plans for future articles. I have still been watching the industry over the past month or so and I haven’t seen much activity in the news cycle. That doesn’t always mean that there isn’t a lot going on, but it does slow down the quantity of articles. I did find quite a bit of chatter over illegal refrigerants. Over the next few days I’m going to be working on an article highlighting the illegal refrigerant purchasing in Europe and also how it is happening here in America.
Beyond that I aim to add additional ‘Refrigerant Fact Sheets.’ These fact sheets act as an all encompassing guide to a specific refrigerant. The goal with these is to be able to answer any and all questions about the refrigerant and to have it all in one place. These articles will be trickling in over the next few months as we move closer to 2019.
Speaking of 2019, we are on pace to hit around seven-hundred thousand views for the 2018 year. While I had high hopes of hitting that one-million number this year I KNOW that we can do it in 2019. For those of you who do not know, RefrigerantHQ, is a hobby of mine that I work on during my off hours. Presently I work full time as a software consultant, but my dream is to grow this business until it can sustain my family and I. If any of you are interested in working with me on any future projects please don’t hesitate to reach out to me via the contact page.
The last update that I want to share with everyone is that my wife and I are expecting our third child here in just a few months. The due date is November 13th, and while I love my two girls more then anything, it will be nice to finally have another man in the family! All that being said, don’t be surprised if I’m a little slow to update for those first few months. I have a feeling I’m going to be up all night with him for a while…