Opinions will differ about putting a ban on web server traffic. There are those who want their blogs and websites free from malicious activity, safe and secure for genuine valuable visitors. Then there are those who think there should be no restrictions on web traffic and activity (some even think spam is not bad).
Let’s clarify the web traffic we’re talking about. We’re not talking of banning referer traffic i.e. traffic from good back-links from websites resulting in genuine visitors.
Regular readers of this blog may be wondering why there’s been so few new posts in the past several months…
The reasons for our tardiness are two-fold: First of all I’ve been relocating my home and business to Aston Bay in the Eastern Cape. Secondly – blame the latest versions of WordPress, and above all the new text editor (TinyMCE 4.*).
Is Roubaix Ovh Systems, a hosting and Internet Service Provider in France, one of the most dangerous ISPs and hosts in the world? We could be justified in thinking so. At least out of ISPs and hosting companies in the Western economic zone, outside of former Soviet Union states.
When you see a spambot active on your site, a hacking attempt, or a trackback spammer, there’s a pretty good chance it’s coming from an IP registered to Roubaix Ovh Systems, or another Ovh Systems IP.
We (Graphicline Web & Technology) have seen so much bad activity from IPs traced back to Roubaix Ovh Systems we now ban all their IPs as soon as I find them. Activity from all other OVH Systems networks are watched carefully
I received some links to a couple of really slow Joomla websites today. The links came in an e-mail with promotional offers from a South African web developer (competitor?). I don’t like to knock other developers so I won’t mention the sites or his name. However, the slow page loads for the two sites mentioned as recent samples, and the hosting setup mentioned motivates me to write about my findings…
The developer states “all sites hosted on my own server which only has my customers on it… All customers have the same server benefits of unlimited email accounts, unlimited website traffic, unlimited website storage…” I was intrigued by the ‘own server’, and decided to have a look at the sites.
Text gets turned into hyperlinks automatically. I just discovered this annoying thing that’s part of the latest version of WordPress used by WordPress.com – WordPress 3.5. Type the text for a URL and the darn thing turns into a hyperlink when published. That’s right, you don’t have to click on the link function in the editor, so no options to add target info and title… No options not to create the hyperlink… Arrgghhh!
Maybe it’s handy for the terminally lazy, but it’s bad news for SEO. And what about the bloggers who write about malware and bad websites, and want to tell readers about these bad addresses? They don’t want visitors to click a hyperlink, just want to inform people about the bad address. With auto-hyperlinks the information becomes an active link!
For example, this hacker information “Exploit attempt on WordPress GD Star Rating plugin”
What appeared to be a botnet attacked one of my sites (tech.graphicline.co.za) this morning in a brute-force wp-login attempt from multiple IP addresses. This was the most coordinated attack against any of my sites I’ve experienced. Usually the hacker bots I see use up to 6 IP’s in these attacks – 146 IPs is serious stuff…
The IP’s listed below are the guilty parties to this brute-force login attack on the site. The main attack started at 05h09 GMT this morning (November 25, 2012) and continued until 05h15 GMT. A second but less intense attacked followed; starting from 05h16 GMT tailing off until ending at 05h43 GMT
When we find problems with our website speed, we look at our website system – Right? We (those of us on shared hosting anyway) have been conditioned by our service providers to think whenever our sites are running slow, it’s our code that’s the problem, not the server provided by the hosting company the site is running on.
Well, sometimes it is. But then again, often it’s not.
There are some circumstances when the server is nearly always the problem. Let’s look at some clues:
GoDaddy Hosting’s entire server network was taken down Monday Sept 10, 2012 by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack by a hacker. Most, if not all, websites hosted by GoDaddy were down for several hours. E-mail and telephone services were also affected
Exactly how many sites were affected. GoDaddy is one of the world’s largest hosting providers and domain registrar with more than 5 million websites affected by the outage, and peak downtime estimates suggest as many as 48 million websites were affected by the attack
Mail Online (dailymail.co.uk) reports:
- Web hosting giant hacked and all of the websites run through GoDaddy were shut down temporarily as a result of Monday’s attack
- Service was eventually restored for the bulk of customers by 5:43pm (GMT)
GoDaddy spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll said:
Would YOU like to host your site on the WordPress.com server network. Sorry, that’s a rhetorical question. There can be only one answer – YES. Well, if I’m reading the adverts correctly, it’s possible.
It seems there’s a whole bunch of things available for Self-hosted WordPress, from several different levels of hosting to a range of expert WordPress support services
I never though I would be saying this – at least not within 12 months of switching my site(s) to CMS. It’s only 12 months – nearly twelve months, since I installed Drupal for my main website, less since adding two WordPress sub-domain sites. Now my the shared server is having to push out more than 80 000 pages a month – or so the server stats show. And it’s causing problems!
It’s causing problems because my domain is exhausting available server resources. The most common resource exceeding limits is CPU – often hitting 100% utilisation. Memory is often going over the available share of 1GB – that’s right 1000MB – available for the domain. While maximum entry processes are averaging between 4 and 6, there have been several instances where the 20 limit was exceeded.
And I’ve been wondering why I’ve been battling to edit and publish content for the past 6 weeks.
Server Resources Usage Chart for graphicline.co.za
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