OT: Web Hosting and the trouble with Spammers

[Derek Bump]

For the past few months my web site has been going down frequently.
When I noticed the constant outages, I wrote a program in Revolution to
monitor my site.  It would check my site every minute, keep a log, and
notify me via TXT Messaging when the site was down.

This was also very useful to my Father, as he hosted numerous web sites
with the same provider.  Not only did I monitor my site, but I also
monitored his.

We contacted our hosting provider at that time, and they said the
outages were due to "a bug in the firewall".  They also said that the
firewall would be "fixed by next week".  That was in August, and the
outages only got worse.

Through September worked my monitoring software even more to take care
of bugs and other errors.  I eventually took an old 333 Mhz PC and
loaded my monitoring software on it.  It now sits behind me, monitoring
all of our web sites 24/7, sending out notifications when necessary.
Works wonderfully!

Then October happened.  The entire server went down for hours instead of
minutes.  That's over 120 domains with about 30 active shopping carts.

After numerous trouble tickets with support over the course of a week I
moved my site to a new server.  My father hung in there, hoping to avoid
having to move 119 domains.

The troubled provider was now saying that the outages were due to "our
overuse of the Sendmail program" and that we would have to upgrade for
$40 more a month to resolve the problem.  According to server logs, our
use of Sendmail for the last 12 months was less than half as much as it
was for the year before that.

With an explanation like that, we couldn't help but wonder if someone
else on the server was over-using Sendmail.  Our providers response was
the "as we told you before..." kind of message.

So my site was finally back online around October 8th.  My online store,
however, wouldn't work with the new host (encrypted/hard-coded).  I
decided to try out my own PHP based store, but later decided against it
as it was too far away from being and complete store.

I then started searching for a cart/store that was cookie-less, simple,
and was compatible with GnuPG.  I eventually found one, and around the
19th of October I was up and running again.  Well, almost, it took about
a week before the orders started coming in.

At the beginning of this week I started helping my father move his
domain names to the provider I am now using.  We've moved about 40 so
far, and I've completed replacing 3 online stores.  The new provider is
wonderful.  Free PHP Module Installation, Secure SSL, Excellent
Technical Support (seriously!), and they're 1/2 the price of the old
provider.

Today we received a message from our old provider explaining the cause
of the outages.  Apparently someone *else* on the server is SPAMMING,
and the amount of spam is taking down the server.  Who would have
thought?!  It only took them 3 months to figure that one out.

No matter though, we already decided that it was time to give another
company the chance to host our sites.



Derek Bump
Dreamscape Software
http://www.dreamscapesoftware.com