ALLGBMINI

A month ago, I had serious spambot comment problems, which caused GBMINI (on WestHost) to basically die. I made a few changes, which included blocking some seriously aggressive IP addresses, but more significantly renaming the standard WordPress comment file (wp-comments-post.php); this file is arbitrarily searched for and accessed by spambot comment programs – the fact that I run the very effective WP-Gatekeeper keeps the spam out of my web pages, but the comments were hitting the site and the SQL database hard.

Of course, GBMINI WordPress also uses Akismet, which filters posted comments and detects spam (un-wanted words, too many links, that sort of thing). With WP-Gatekeeper running, Akismet basically never sees any spam comments – but a curious quirk is that it counts all the junked-by-Gatekeeper comments as blocked, as if it had done them itself.
This makes for a very interesting daily spam comment chart, showing the effect of the changes I made in mid March:

Basically my spam comment count dropped from 2,000-5,000 per day, down to just a few hundred per day – impressive 🙂

Website hosting, that is …

I’ve been using WestHost for a couple years now; I moved to them knowing I would pay much more, but expecting to get much more.
I purchased a “reseller” account at nearly $30/month – supposedly you get the same resources as 7 normal accounts, and I distributed them between my websites GBMINI, GPMINI and MargaretAndIan – I expected to get faster than average performance by doing that, as well as good reliability.
Well, I did get reliability (apart from one big down time), but I never really got the speed I wanted.

And now, I’m due for annual renewal in a few weeks, and it’s hard to pay $28/month, when so many other hosting services are out there for below $10/month – of course some of those could be rubbish!

I’ve been researching a lot recently. I’ve been testing GeekStorage for a few months now. Generally very good, not gone down at all, but recently been very slow. Support says they know and are working on it, but an amount of silence from their people has sent me elsewhere (a shame, since my great plan was to try hosting with M&I, and if good then move GBMINI and GPMINI).

I was close to trying BlueHost (aka HostMonster); but Robert has been having hassle with them recently, so I kept looking. I tried FatCow over the weekend – they offered all the good features and seemed responsive and communicative, and they had a $42 for first year special price and you know how I like that number …
But FatCow is unbelievably slow; so I junked them almost immediately, and searched further.

I’ve now settled on Host Gator; not the lowest cost – but paying least isn’t always smart. And definitely less expensive than WestHost. Faster too, so far … and what attracted me too was their available and detailed network status. Some companies have no available status, you have to fill in support tickets and hope they respond. Some I’ve seen only let status be seen by existing customers, so you can’t check them out beforehand. Those companies don’t get my business!

Moving to HostGator took more work than I’d wished; I was going to switch to Gallery v2.3 as part of the move, but that blew up when given my v2.2 data, and then left everything in a huge mess when I tried to revert to v2.2 – finally tonight wiped everything, and started again, re-patched all the little Gallery modifications, and got it all working (I think!)

Of course, any hosting company is a gamble these days – we’ve even seen “big boys” like MotoringFile and MINI2 go down, and in the end my little hobby website is unimportant … but I prefer it to work, reasonably well, than to work not at all!

Hopefully, this is the last you’ll hear about hosting for at least a couple more years 😉