How We Lost Our Website — And Built It Back

In April 2026, our website went down. Not a routine outage. The server had been hit by ransomware, and every file on it — the WordPress install, the database, the uploaded images, the backups stored on the same machine — was encrypted. What was left was a directory of unreadable blobs and a note demanding payment.

We did not pay. The decision was quick, and in hindsight obvious: paying would have funded the next attack on someone else, and given us no guarantee of getting our content back. We took the site offline and began thinking about what a rebuild would actually look like.

The first weeks were spent taking stock of what we had lost. Seven years of product pages — everything we had published since founding Suvastika in 2019, press coverage, technical write-ups, and blog posts — gone from our own servers. A small archive of original photos and PDFs survived on personal laptops. Everything else had to be found elsewhere or recreated.

The Wayback Machine did most of the heavy lifting. The Internet Archive had crawled suvastika.com regularly over the years, and many of our pages — including ones we had long since stopped thinking about — were preserved there in usable form. We wrote scripts to walk the snapshots, extract the HTML, and pull down whatever images had been captured. The recovery was not perfect. Some pages came back in older versions; some came back without their original images. But the bulk of our content was reconstructable.

The rebuild itself was a chance to do things we had been putting off for years. We moved off WordPress to a custom-coded site, with our content versioned in a real database instead of a single fragile server. Backups now live in a different place from the application. Uploads are immutable. The whole stack is cheaper to run and faster to load than what it replaced.

Tanishq, who led the rebuild, documented the full technical recovery here.

The site you are reading this on is the result. It is not identical to the old suvastika.com, and it never will be. But it is ours again, and this time it is built to survive the next bad day.