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.
Tricia, if you are not sure about what happened exactly, you should track who accessed your site. Track IPs into some simple file (do you know PHP? – it is a few lines of code) and if you find something suspicious, you can disable access for some IPs through the .htaccess file.
Also “accessed repeatedly” doesn’t tell anyone what happened exactly.
Here’s how the .htaccess should look like in order to block IPs (add following lines somewhere at the bottom of your .htaccess):
order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from 72.232.82.122 #copy this line and change IPs in order to stop opening your site from there
I get sometimes the same problems and WP-cache won’t help. You need something stronger that lets customize IP addresses and how many times your site is being accessed by the same IP.
My solution? talked to my host and asked them to filter out this nasty IP adresses.
Hostgator have a good reputation. Check out http://www.JaguarPc.net also. Go for semi-dedicated with CPanel rather than VPS; the latter is complicated to set up and run.
I don’t know what software your blog is running on, but all the includes and plugins ramp-up the resource usage.