Archives for August 2007

Site trouble yet again!

August 31, 2007 by Tricia

I’m having site problems yet again.

This is really starting to tick me off.

At about 9:30 pm last night the index.php file on my main blog domain Feverishthoughts.com was accessed repeatedly. I received a note from Hostgator shortly after this happened telling me about the problem and also saying that they’d shut down access to that directory.

At least this time round it’s a little better than when I was with Lunarpages. They’ve actually been able to tell me specifically what time the problem occurred and which domain was affected. They also only shut down that domain rather than my whole account. So at least I’ve got two blogs and two websites still functioning.

At this point – 3:30 a.m. I’ve been going back and forth with support. I think we’ve exchanged email three times now. The last one stated that they’d let me back into my directory to add the wp-cache plugin to my site and then monitor my directory after that.

The thing is that I’m already using wp-cache. So I just wrote back to them and told them that. I also told them that all my plugins and blogs are up to date.

Hopefully they’ll activate my directory again and monitor it as they said.

I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t know if the domain was under some kind of attack or if I just had too many visitors all at once. I really don’t know. I suspect a bot attack of some kind as I’ve been getting hit with a lot more spam across all my blogs lately and bad behavior and akismet just aren’t cutting it.

I know that I certainly don’t need to be having site troubles this weekend! It’s a long weekend and I’ve got a family reunion going on with my brothers and sisters. I won’t be home much and when I am home I’ll probably have guests so if my main blog domain isn’t back up soon and or if it runs into trouble over the next four days I just won’t be able to deal with it. Which sucks.

I keep flirting with the issue of possibly having to move my sites to VPS. Hostgator doesn’t offer VPS. They have Semi-dedicated which is still part of their shared account service and then they have dedicated servers. Their semi-dedicated package offers just about everything I have with my current account but I believe it has much higher CPU resource limits. That’s something I have to check on. Semi-dedicated costs $74.95 per month. Big jump from what I’m paying now.

So again. If anyone has any advice for me or can suggest a hosting company that offers VPS, hopefully at a reasonable price I’d appreciate it. I want to deal with this issue before my sites end up being totally shut down like they were in July with that other webhost I was using.

BTW 4 a.m. my feverishthoughts.com domain is back up and running. Fingers crossed that it behaves now.

The War on Comment Spam

August 30, 2007 by Tricia

Have you had an increase in general spam on your sites lately?

For some reason all my sites are getting more spam in the akismet spam folder. I’m using the bad behavior plugin, and I’ve been using it since February. The bad behavior plugin greatly reduced the amount of spam that was even reaching my akismet spam folder. Since February I went from having 500 spam a day per site (well my sites with fairly high traffic) to only one to ten spam per day thanks to the bad behavior plugin.

Lately though, I’ve found that I’ve been getting more and more spam in my spam folder and some that’s not even being picked up by akismet. Either akismet isn’t working quite as well as it used to or some thing’s changed out there.

Enough about spam that’s being generated by bots and hopefully being caught by akismet or whatever system we have in place to catch it. The spam that has continued to upset me throughout the summer has been human generated comment spam on my do follow blogs.

The other day I had one persistent comment spammer. This person left very lame comments “nice photo”, “I agree”, “I’m not in AUS” and so on, on two of my blogs. Lame comments are one thing, but this person left about 16 of these comments on the two sites and left links for two different businesses. In one of the SEO type keyword links were the words (use this as much as possible) beside the keyword Teeth Whitener. So the comment looked like this:

Teeth Whitener (use this as much as possible)
Nice photo!

I’m assuming that the line use this as much as possible was instructions to use that keyword as much as possible because in later comments other words were added to the keyword phrase.

I use Lucia’s Linky Love do follow plugin now so people have to leave a certain amount of comments before their links will follow. I love that plugin. Ever since I began using it the human generated comment spam has reduced greatly. I think this person was attempting to leave enough comments to qualify for links that followed.

I was angry at this persons blatant attempt to spam my sites, so you know what I did? I visited the two companies that he or she had attempted to leave links for and found their contact page. I then left them a comment that said something like this:

Have you recently paid a company to leave your links in the comment section of blogs? If you have, this company is doing your business a disservice.

In the last 24 hours someone left 16 comments on two of my blogs with links to your business and another business. The comments were left on fairly lengthy and detailed blog posts yet the comments were most often only two words such as “nice photo” or one line comments that didn’t make much sense.

Here’s an example of the comments that were left on my sites:

Example that includes keyword for link, ip address, commenter’s email address and comment

I’ve deleted all the comments left by this person, so if you’ve paid to have links added to blogs you’ve just wasted your money.

Other bloggers have stated they’ve been receiving these types of comment links as well and they’ve also been deleting them. I think you’d have much more success advertising your company if you approached individual bloggers directly or created an advertising campaign. You’d have links within articles if you did that and links within articles are much more highly regarded by search engines.

Since the comment spammer left their email address I also sent them a note asking them why they were spamming my site and I told them that I’d contacted the companies for which they’d left links. I also warned them that they might soon be out of a job if the companies stopped buying comment links.

So far neither business nor comment spammer have replied.

If you’ve also been getting comment spam similar to the kind that I’ve discussed in this article please feel free to follow my lead by contacting the companies who’s links have been left in your posts comment section. You can copy the letter that I wrote above and simply paste it into a businesses contact form. This should save you some time. Be sure to include an example of the type of lame comment spam you were bombarded with when the spammer hit your site.

Who knows, maybe the company you contact will reply to your note and ask you to write a blog post for them.

Check your feedburner stats

August 24, 2007 by Tricia

I was just visiting feedburner and much to my shock almost all my sites said that they had zero subscribers!

Obviously something strange has happened at feedburner or at least I kind of hope that something has. I mean, some of my sites have a few hundred subscribers or they did up until I checked my feedburner stats a few minutes ago.

Check your feedburner account and see if your subscribers have suddenly decreased or worse fallen to zero.

Let me know what you find out?

FeedSmith Plugin might help reduce CPU resource issues

August 20, 2007 by Tricia

A couple of weeks ago when I was having hosting troubles I was trying to find ways to cut down on the amount of CPU resources that might be used by my sites. I updated my plugins and got rid or some that I suspected were eating up CPU.

So far every things been going well on my new host. I’m keeping my figures crossed. Of course it’s summer and there’s been a small dip in traffic across all my sites in the last month or so as well so I guess I won’t really know if I’ve cured my CPU resource problems until everyones back from holidays or back to work and school and using the web the way they were before summer got in the way.

Andy Beard had suggested that I try using the FeedSmith plugin for Feedburner. He found articles on other blogs that seems to infer that bots, feed readers and visitors constantly hitting a sites feed could be a substantial drain on CPU resources.

I’ve always been pretty good about checking my site stats and keeping track of what’s been happening with my sites as far as traffic goes and I’d already noticed that my feeds were hit more than even the main index page of my sites. So I decided to try using the FeedSmith plugin in order to see if it helped cut down on resource usage.

The plugin is very easy to use. Just download the FeedSmith plugin, upload it to your WordPress content plugins folder and activate it. All you need to do after that is create a feedburner feed for your site if you haven’t already. Once you’ve done that you can go to your WP dashboard, click options and then go to the admin panel for Feedsmith and input your feedburner feed for your blog. You can also create and list a feedburner plugin for your sites comments too.

What the Feedsmith plugin does is consolidate all of your sites feeds into a feedburner feed. As you probably already know, your themes header lists a variety of feeds that can be used with your site. The most common are rss1, rss2 and atom. You might very well have subscribers for each of these feeds. How can you keep track of how many subscribers you have when they are all subscribed to different site feeds? Funnel them all to your feedburner feed.

Now when a bot comes along to read your feed, or someone accesses your feed via a feed reader they’ll be directed to your feedburner feed.

In theory this should take some of the load off your site, or that’s what Andy and the articles that he pointed me to presumed.

Looking at my stats for this domain and my main domain feverishthoughts.com it does look like hits to my feeds have gone down substantially. Now the month isn’t over, and I haven’t blogged that much on this site this month so the stats on hits to the feed for this domain might not mean all that much.

At this point it looks like hits on this sites feed have been cut in half. Hits on my busiest website, the main blog on feverishthoughts.com are down by two thirds! Again, the month isn’t over and traffic has decreased a bit this month, but that’s my busiest site and there’s been a marked decrease in hits to that sites feed. So the plugin must be working.

A nice side effect of using the FeedSmith plugin is that it is now gathering better stats for all my subscribers so when I visit the Feedburner site I see that the number of subscribers listed for each of my sites has gone up.

I mean UP. Like 300%.

I knew that some of our sites had a lot of feed subscribers, but because they weren’t all being picked up properly by feedburner I realized that the numbers I’d been seeing were low. The new numbers that I’ve been seeing since I installed the plugin are much more believable.

I’ll check on the feed stats at the end of the month to see if there really have been less hits to my feeds thanks to the plugin and I’ll also check on them at the end of September which I expect will be back to normal traffic levels.

My hosting troubles – the full story

August 3, 2007 by Tricia

Andy Beard was nice enough to let others know about my hosting problems with Lunarpages and I thought I would just give a few more details about what happened in my month of hosting hell!

I must begin by saying that if Lunarpages hadn’t pulled what I’ve come to think of as a “fast one” by charging me for two years worth of VPS when I wanted a monthly account I might still be with them. They refunded, but did not apologize.

I will more than likely need a VPS or a Dedicated hosting account in the near future.

If you are looking to switch web hosts I wouldn’t go with Lunarpages – not because of my story (they were fine up until I had troubles), but because they only provide phone support from 8 am until 8 pm Monday to Friday. If something goes wrong with your sites you want 24/7 support, preferably with a web host that offers 24/7 phone support. It makes a difference.

Unlike others who’ve recently had hosting problems with their web hosts due to high CPU resource issues Lunarpages wouldn’t tell me what time my problems started on the days that they noticed a high CPU resource usage. It certainly might have helped if I’d known exactly what time the problem occurred.

It would have also helped if they could have told me which of my many domains the problem was located on. Surely a web hosting company must be able to see that in their daily logs?

I have 10 domains. 15 WordPress installations, 16 blogs, one very large HTML based website (it’s been around since 1995 so it’s busy), and one website that’s run using the Joomla CMS.

When a web host tells you that your account has used too much CPU resources and can’t tell you what caused the problem other than it was a script on one of your sites, and you have as many sites and two types of scripted website platforms (Joomla and WordPress) to go through as I do it’s pretty near impossible to pinpoint what is causing the problem.

Web hosting companies need to be able to give their clients more information when a problem occurs. They’ll have happier customers, will be more likely to retain their client base and obviously the website owner would be more than likely happy to fix a potential problem with their site. Bad scripts and plugins don’t only occasionally cause cpu resource issues, they are often security risks too.

Almost everything that I use on my sites was up to date, but I did go through my sites and spent time updating any plugins that had been updated, and I removed plugins that I thought might call the database too often. A post view counter plugin and post rating plugin were removed. If anything was causing a problem I suspect it could have been these plugins, but I removed them June 26th – hours after getting my first notice of CPU problems. I basically only left the plugins or add ons that I thought were essential to the running of my sites.

Lunarpages kept coming back telling me that my sites were using too much CPU resources after I’d done all of the above. I even went through all my directories looking for any files that seemed too large or ones that I didn’t recognize in case there were files that I hadn’t put there. I didn’t find anything out of order.

At this point I’m not sure that I had a problem with any of my plugins, modules or components. It might simply have been a traffic problem or spam attack.

I think it’s also interesting to note that I heard from Lunarpages approximately four times in the first two weeks beginning June 26th. Each time they reported my CPU resource overuse. I then went a period of almost two weeks without hearing from them. By this time I’d deleted plugins and upgraded anything that had needed upgrading. I wrote to them asking if my problems were resolved since I hadn’t been hearing from them and they wrote back to tell me that I still had CPU resource issues. Three days later they suspended my account.

Whether that means anything exactly I don’t know, but if this issue was happening daily wouldn’t they have been reporting the issue to me daily?

The day my account was suspended they shut me down at 11:35 am. I was not home at the time so I know I wasn’t doing anything to my sites that might have caused an overuse of CPU resource, say deleting spam for example, when the trouble occurred.

The issue that finally shut me down must have been due to traffic or calls to the database. All they would tell me was that the resource usage when up so high that it almost crashed the non production server that my account was on.

In the month of July my sites in total got 1.2 million page views. That’s with all my sites down for almost four days, and several time outs throughout the month of July. The majority of those page views were on the seven blogs that I have on my feverishthoughts.com domain (over 800,000 page views) with Tricia’s Musings, As the Garden Grows and Odd planet being the most popular sites.

Since Lunarpages was unable or unwilling to tell me what times my CPU resources went up, or on which domain, it was very difficult to pinpoint where the problem was occurring or even if there truly was a problem with one of my scripts.

If they’d been able to tell me that it was the feverishthoughts.com domain I would have first suspected high traffic as the cause. If they’d said it was on my Joomla run domain I would have suspected a faulty script.

I didn’t go around yelling Lunarpages sucks. I’m still not doing that. I’ve had a bad experience that left a bad taste in my mouth, but others might have years of successful hosting with them.

I appreciate that in the beginning they moved my account to another server – a slower non production server that slowed my sites and that was perhaps less able to handle my traffic – so that I’d have some time to figure out the source of my problem.

Their handling of my issues beginning on July 21st when my account was suspended and their subsequent moving of my account to VPS after I’d told them NO when they mentioned the $75 hour service charge and then going ahead, doing it anyway, creating a two year VPS account when I’d only originally agreed to a monthly account which should have been covered using the remainder of the balance of my two year shared hosting account (19 months remained!) and then charging me $642 – well yeah … that makes them suck. That’s just plain wrong.

Each time I wrote to support it took anywhere from 8 to 24 hours for a reply. The majority of my issue with them happened on the weekend when they do not offer phone support and I suspect have fewer staff working.

I felt like I was writing the same questions, requests and or instructions over and over again in my dealings with support. They weren’t listening.

I don’t think that I’m that hard to understand. Am I? 😉 No means no, yes means yes, send me more info means send me more info. Right?

I do think that in the near future I will have to move to VPS or dedicated hosting because my traffic is increasing substantially each month. 6 of my domains are newish and I haven’t done much to promote them, once they begin to get busy I’m sure I’ll need to upgrade.

I am interested in hearing what companies others are dealing with, and I’d prefer to be able to use C-panel as that’s what I’m used to although I can learn a new system if I need to.

when I quickly had to change web hosts I went with Hostgator and have been with them since July 23 or 24. Not long enough to fully assess their service.

I will say that I do appreciate that they have a support ticket system, live chat and telephone support – all 24/7. I’m on shared hosting right now but they also offer what they call semi dedicated (which I think must be like VPS) and Dedicated servers so I can move up if I have a problem or if my sites get too busy.

Dell notebook delay irritates customers

August 2, 2007 by Tricia

Dell recently irritated a number of their customers who’d been waiting for the new Dell XPS M1330 notebook to ship. The shipments problem seems to be over, but Dell may need a period of recovery after this disaster.

Customers have been posting hundreds of messages on Dells Direct2Dell blog. Those post are not just upset over the delay, they feel that they’ve been mislead.

Dells blog is supposed to be a tool to communicate with customers, potential new clients and the media, but the blog has recently become an outlet for the multitude of complaints that have been pouring in over the XPS M1330 notebook.

The notebook was announced in late June and was expected to have delivery dates of up to four to six weeks for some customers. This is a much longer shipping time than had been anticipated.

Clients have been visiting the blog to post their complaints over customer service, and miscommunication during ordering.

Dell’s made a mission to move forward yet this product delay is a step backwards judging by the publics displeasure over shipping delays.

What do you think of this situation? Should they have delayed their announcement that the product was ready for sale if it really wasn’t? Did they under estimate the demand for this high end laptop?

Are you one of the impatient buyers?

Primary domain name in addon urls? Help!

August 1, 2007 by Tricia

I’ve had a problem with some of my blogs in the past month and a half or so. When I first set up a few of my blogs on my feverishthoughts.com domain I didn’t create sub-domains. Instead I created the new blogs as directories within the feverishthoughts.com domain.

So instead of my gardening blog being located at garden.feverishthoughts.com it’s located at feverishthoughts.com/garden/. It wasn’t my smartest move, but that’s not my current problem. I’ve purchased new domains for some of the directory blogs and I’ll eventually move those blogs to their own domains once the new domains have gained some page rank.

The problem that I’m having is that about a month and a half ago I noticed that some of my directory domains – not all of them, just half – are acting up. If you visit the site and include the backslash at the end of the address the url works properly, but if you don’t include the slash at the end or if you click on the header or a “home” button the new site url will contain my primary domain url in it as well.

One of the sites that is doing this is my husbands blog Odd Planet. If you visit the site as I’ve just listed the url it looks fine, but click on the Odd Planet logo on the upper left hand side of the page and the url comes up as:

http://feverishthoughts.thewebfiles.com/oddplanet/

Thewebfiles.com is the primary domain on my hosting account. Feverishthoughts.com and my other domains are addon domains.

On my main Feverishthoughts website – Tricia’s Musings, I have a 301 redirect code in my htaccess file that places the www in the url as my site has higher PR if the www is in the url. However, all the rest of the the blogs on that domain have higher PR if there is no www in their url so I’m using a nowww wordpress plugin to redirect those urls.

Trouble is that the plugin doesn’t seem to be working lately. Hmm maybe I should try re-installing that plugin. The current copy might have been damaged in all the server transfers my sites have gone through lately. I doubt that’s the problem, but I’ll give it a try.

The htaccess file on my primary domain Thewebfiles.com only contains the coding that WordPress places in it and nothing else.

The htacess file that I’ve altered in the root of feverishthoughts.com contains:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.|$) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

The section that I bolded is the portion of the code that redirects to www, the rest of the coding is placed there by WordPress when it is first installed.

I placed that code in the feverishthoughts.com htaccess in mid-May and all my directory related blogs under feverishthoughts.com were working fine.

I believe it was mid-June when I noticed that some of my directory blogs had thewebfiles.com in their urls under certain circumstances. I don’t believe I added any plugins or altered any code during this time period.

The problem might not have occurred in mid-June as I believe it did though, it might have occurred after June 26th when Lunarpages moved my whole account to another server when they stated that I was having CPU resource issues. They then moved my account again temporarily to a VPS server on July 23rd after they’d suspended my shared hosting account. Read my CPU Resource issue problems or my story about changing hosts if you need to catch up on that issue! (I’ll be posting a more detailed story about my issues with Lunarpages tomorrow)

I’ve since moved to HostGator (July 23rd) and they did a full c-panel back up for me of my Lunarpages account so I believe whatever issues I had with my subdomain or directory blog setting on Lunarpages have followed me to Hostgator.

Does anyone have any idea as to how I might resolve this issue? Perhaps a 301 redirect to the proper url for the blog in each directory blogs htaccess file? If so – can you please give me a 301 direct code that might work with a mydomain.com/blog/ blog?

I’ve found that it’s hard to find htaccess codes that work properly with directories. That’s one reason why I’ve ended up using a nowww wordpress plugin on those blogs since I couldn’t find a proper htaccess code to exclude the www from my directory blogs.

Other things that I’ve thought of that could be the cause of the problem:

1. The way my domains were added on to to my account?

2. A problem in the mySQL database for the few sites that are having this peculiar problem.

3. A problem with the themes I’m using? (least likely …)

4. The httaccess code that I’m using in the root of feverishthoughts.com

5. the nowww wordpress plugins that I’m using in the directory blogs to keep www out of the url.

Any ideas? I really need to resolve this issue because the search engines are starting to index my sites with the strange url now too.

Site trouble yet again!

The War on Comment Spam

My hosting troubles – the full story

Dell notebook delay irritates customers

Primary domain name in addon urls? Help!

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