I had a fully functioning website that is down due to hacking. This experience has been a nightmare and has cost much time and money. My solution is to change the website to a static, html only version and shed the database, php, admin panel, etc. I anticipate that this will close the avenue the hackers were using to take down the site, and even if they did, I could just replace the html only files in the ftp within a few minutes. My question is, is there a simple way using the contents in my ftp (for the current php+mysql site) to make an html only website? And how?
Sorry, there isn't any "simple way". If the php driven site writes html, you could always view the pages in the browser, then copy and paste the page source into the original php file, then save as an html file.
You could use HTTrack for downloading page and then make necessary changes, but to use it you'll need to make it working. (Sorry, but I can't put links yet). But if page use some php tricks it can produce unexpected results. I don't think converting page to html is a good idea. You should rather find someone with deep IT security knowledge and practical expirience and try to reduce the threat. If you don't improve the security, even if you convert your page, when the bad guy will be good enough, he'll cause you a lot of troubles. And the last: Lightning never strikes twice in the same place
Actually, you are probably not too far off track in your idea. straight html is much harder to inject and much easier to recover from. Converting your entire site could be problematic though, it depends on how big it is and how much of it relies on mysql. Also it depends on what php code you have and what function it performs. It is hard to tell without seeing the site. My guess is that you would probably have to build it from scratch. Labor intensive for sure. I suggest Wordpress + Bad Behavior plugin. Easy to manage and that is a lot easier than creating html pages from scratch..
I think you need to find out why it is you are being hacked? Is it poor passwords? Is the database server software out of date? Is your PHP code out of date or programmed poorly causing vunerabilities? Or is the hack just not with your specific site but more at a server level - in other words, is it your server being hacked or is it your site directly. Also, how does the hacking cause your site to be down? If you can explain more as to what happens (ie: overwrites files, redirects your domain name, database is corrupted or database server goes down, etc) and perhaps someone can help out.