UPDATE: Hmm … it turns out my default eWillys WP theme was causing some issues. That might just have been the source of a couple problems. Or, I’m just playing whack a mole …. anyhow, I’ll leave up this theme until I fix the other one.
We aren’t too far away (Monday or Tuesday) from being up and running again on a newer, much faster server. So, why the big delay?
1) SPAM/BOT Traffic: I have reading through log files. The spam bots/spiders are hitting the site with enough frequency that it is slowing down the site to a crawl (or using up all webhost resources altogether). I have tried numerous strategies to reduce the strain of these on the webhost, which has helped, but not cured the resource use problem. Even the back end, which I use to do updates, etc, is nearly unusable due to the busy server.
2) COMMENT SPAM: The amount of comment spam has dramatically increased. Look at this chart. It shows approx 3000 spam comments (automated comments that are junk) in September 2012. By December that number had increased ten fold to 30,000 spam comments. While there are defenses in place to deal with that, I suspect that is helping cause resource problems as well.
3) SERVER HOSTS: Like Goldilocks, I tried a couple different server hosts (experiences described in posts below). One proved too frustrating, one proved too limiting. For the third try, I’ve turned to the McDonagh Brothers, web hosts and developers who, as lovers of jeeps, have a bit of self interest in seeing the site succeed. We should be up and going monday or tuesday.
In the meantime, I’m using Facebook to provide some contact and updates: http://www.facebook.com/pages/EWillys/304123822973935
Glad you’re working out the kinks. Sounds like my CJ2A is easier to rebuild than a website.
Running the site isn’t all that difficult, but defending it from spammers/bots/etc does present challenges. It’s the price of having lots of content along with lots of readers.
What do these spam bots do? Are they trolling for email addresses or are they trying to place ads on the site? Non internet website savvy folks like me have no clue, seems like there should be some penalties in place for what they do…
Progress & patience, Glad you have both Dave.
not sure where the issue is, but Chrome says there’s a re-direct loop error when I try to access…
Firefox loads right up…
Bikeman: yeah, there’s some strange things happening. I moved the ewillys theme over to my test site and it seemed to caused problems with my test site.
So, I’ve switched themes on eWillys to a basic one and now things load.
Buz: What do the bots do? Like Witches, some are good witches, some are bad. The good witches use bots to index the content on a site (Google, Bing, Yahoo). Bad bots will scrape content and republish it on other sites, they will look for vulnerabilities to exploit so they can hide code into your website, or they are going through files for other reasons. Bots come from all over and sometimes its difficult to catch the originator, making it difficult to punish someone.
I hate to say it, but maybe you have to put up those word and letter photo identifiers like craigslist does?
That’s called Captcha. I already had to do that on user sign ups. I think I have solved the comment problem by putting some code in what’s called a htaccess file to block comment spam.