Sorry guys, the server is being subjected to an inordinate amount of spam that is brining the server to its knees. Support is looking at the problem and hope that they will be able to fix it soon, or the spammer twerps leave us alone.
Bear with us a bit…
Comments
spammmmmmmmmmmmerz… =\
Get rich quick, 1mprove your manh00d and
augment your br3ast size with C_iagravi_alis, a new medicine
developed in Nigeria by Saliman Bugononishu, son of
deposed Minister of Finance from Botswongo!… etc, etc.
Scott
Scott…lol
It’s not spam, it’s high volume email/word deployment!
http://www.spikedhumor.com/articles/44841/The_Daily_Show_Spammers.html
:).
I was wondering why it wasn’t able to connect – I feared that the MoDisnformation blocked you or something ;P.
Yeah, I was worried too for a moment but then realized that if it was blocked, I wouldnt be getting the WordPress Error page.
We’re like addicts, Mahmood – we need our daily (or hourly) fix of the Den!
What kind of Spam? If its comment spam, then BB2 and SK2 are your friend 😉
They protect my blog really well, and are very easy to use.
I use Akismet and it has stopped 15,000 spam comments so far I think, and it’s solid!
We’re not sure exactly what the deal is, although we now think after analysing the logs that some of my articles get linked into the “heavy” blogs and of course when that happens, the server gets hit very very hard. I don’t have the budget to add another load balancing server onto the set up, so we just have to ride the wave of fame until it expires and we get back to our normal life.
I’ve been actually thinking of moving mahmood.tv to one of the free services like wordpress.com or blogspot as then I won’t have to worry about technicalities, but just write!
BB2 is good in the way it doesnt let the spam reach your site in the first place, whereas Akismet+SK2 work to keep the comments clean. Two very different things, but a definate requirement for a large and popular blog as yours.
Do you currently host the site on a webhost or a personal server? A shared host/semi-dedicated hosted server would be plenty for your site IMHO. If you go further, you could host multiple blogs on a single dedicated box, which I have seen for about 60-70$/month. That way you get an entire box, in a datacenter with much higher bandwidth and capacity for growth.
If you move to wordpress.com, can you take your current database? I didnt think they allowed that.
I’ll have a look at BB2 and let you know my thoughts. I didn’t know about it but for your mention.
I have my own private server which I pay $315 a month for. It’s in Rackspace’s data center and the reason I chose them is that over the last couple of years their support was exemplary. I get good hardware and more importantly enough bandwidth and threshold limits that I have never reached yet.
wow, 315$/month seems rather a lot for a dedi box, unless its got some pretty high specs. Be sure to check out http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ as thats where you can find the best deals for dedicated servers. I assume you’re hosting alot of sites off this one box?
A hosting seller friend of mine generally gets well spec’d boxes with 1TB in bandwidth for about 80-90$/month, pre-loaded with OS of his choice. And he always tries to get his dedi boxes in Germany, which after USA is the best place to get deals/high spec’d/high bandwidth servers.
Mahmood also check out valueweb. I use them and they offer good support
billT
Thanks for the concern guys, but I’m not moving away from Rackspace. I find their service alone is worth what I pay.
TechZ I tried installing BB2 but it got screwed up somehow… I decided to try due to the increase in spam I am getting on the sites. I don’t know if it was a coincidence but immediately I unarchived the package into the plugins directory I got 403 error on all the sites! That makes me really weary of trying to install it again.
Can you advise how you did it and if there are any changes to the files?
Hmm, All that I had to do was unzip the BB2 folder to the /plugins/ folder and enable it via the Plugins CP in the WP Dash, that’s all, so far Im using it on my blog and have got 3 others to start using it as well, no issues whatsoever, except for well protected blogs 🙂
You could email the plugin creator, I did for something unrelated and he replied quite promptly, it’s a great plugin
BB2, here/ with the latest download link here
Instructions on install here.
Hope it works!