Flash Cache Is Dangerous – It Crashed my Website

  • I have been using WordPress for several years now, so I am not a beginner. I am an intermediate to advanced user. After activating the plugin, it gave me an error message that it had to update my htaccess file. After reading the detailed description and good reviews, and seeing that it had no bad reviews, I felt I could trust this plugin’s developers so I agreed to let it make changes to my htaccess file. Unfortunately, after doing so, all kinds of bad and weird things started happening to my pages and posts, so I deactivated the plugin and then deleted it. As soon as I did, my entire website was gone and replaced with a white 403 forbidden screen. I then logged into my hosting plan and saw that 98% of my WordPress root files and wp-content files (including hundreds of uploads!) were all gone. Thankfully my hosting provider conducted a server rewind that got 95% of my website back, the rest I pieced together on my own which took a couple of days. It was sooo stressful, I wouldn’t wish what I went through on my worst enemy. I will NEVER recommend this plugin (if there was an option to choose no stars that is what I would have selected). It is a dangerous plugin.

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  • Plugin Author etruel

    (@etruel)

    Hi Melissa O’Donnell, we are very sorry to hear about your experience, and I want you to know that we take every situation and every user that uses the plugin very seriously.
    I know it is very frustrating to go through this kind of situations or make a mistake that breaks the site without having previously made a backup as advanced users do.
    The plugin does not delete or modify anything in the WordPress files, it always works in its own directory that is configured in its Settings page.
    But thanks to your comment we found a bug when uninstalling from the plugins page. We have fixed it and uploaded the new version.
    It’s a pity that you were several days with your site down and you didn’t ask for help in the WordPress support forum or even in our site since we offer free help to our users.
    Lastly, we use the plugin ourselves on at least 10 of our sites and have never had any problems deleting WordPress files or uploads. The problem was when uninstalling the plugin by deleting it from the WordPress Plugins page, but I repeat, it has been fixed now.

    Best regards.

    Thread Starter Melly

    (@melissaod)

    I OF COURSE have always had Updraft installed and make backups nightly. However, your plugin changed my htaccess file and then crashed my website giving me a 403 Forbidden screen so I was not able to access the admin dashboard in order to restore an Updraft backup easily. Luckily, before restoring my website to its previous state, I did save a copy of your plugin’s htaccess code then used an htaccess code checker and it found fatal error in your plugin’s code. I have been using WordPress for six years and I have never had such a problem with any other plugin. I did not want to reach out for help from the plugin support because I no longer trusted it and I wanted nothing to do with it. My review is not about you as a person, it is about the major difficulty I encountered to let other users know what to look out for. Reviews are there to help other users and they should know what happened. I’m happy for you if you have corrected the problem. Good luck.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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