The Setup
Laura LaBine runs a recruiting firm where the website is the center of everything. Employers list opportunities, candidates submit applications, and clients take action through the site. After Smack Happy completed her custom website design, Laura opted out of a care plan because she already had a long-term GoDaddy contract covering hosting, monthly backups, and technical support. She figured she was covered.
The Problem
In early December, Laura received a Google alert that her site wasn’t appearing in search results. What she didn’t know was that the site wasn’t just delisted. It was down entirely, and had been for at least two days. GoDaddy never notified her. Smack Happy did. We investigated and determined the most likely cause was a form of hacking, where a compromised user account or vulnerable plugin gave someone unauthorized access. We offered to contact GoDaddy on Laura’s behalf to restore the site from their latest backup. But the monthly backups had failed. Nearly every backed-up database file was corrupted. After almost two hours with GoDaddy’s technical support, their restore feature stopped working completely. There was no usable backup, and nothing GoDaddy could do about it.
Our Approach
We offered to rebuild Laura’s site piece by piece from our original design files and public digital archives. That meant pulling files from the original launch, referencing the Wayback Machine alongside our mockups, performing plugin troubleshooting, running malware security scans, and reconfiguring user logins. Every single page and blog post had to be rebuilt, tested, and verified manually. Laura gave the green light immediately. John checked in with her hourly. Anna pulled design files for technical support and recommendations. Danielle worked late into the night restoring the site page by page.
The Outcome
Within six hours of discovering the outage, Smack Happy had Laura’s website back online. The full rebuild was completed in under 24 hours. When we attempted to set up new backups through GoDaddy afterward, the same failures resurfaced, and GoDaddy couldn’t explain why or guarantee future reliability. Laura moved to Smack Happy’s WordPress Maintenance plan, which includes daily backups, 24/7 uptime monitoring, daily security scanning, and monthly website checkups. Her site hasn’t gone down since.