Perverts brought my blog down

Perverts brought my blog down = 1 hour of downtime

I can’t believe it! It was late in the afternoon when I arrived from my out of town trip and when I checked my blog, a big FORBIDDEN error message was showing up in my homepage. I was shocked and I was thinking if hostgator deleted this blog too due to copyright issues.

Well, the first thing I did was to try to log-in to my dashboard and luckily, I can still access it. The only page that was disabled was my “index.php” page which was basically, the life of my blog. Without this page, nobody can see/read or do anything to my blog.

While trying not to panic, I checked my email to see if there’s any information that was sent to me during my absense. I found an email from Hostgator telling me that they disabled my blog because I was using up too much resources. Their log files pointed to the posts I made for seo. Can you guess which posts these are?

These are all the posts with Hayden Kho‘s name on it. sKandoll here and sKandoll there… and my blog gets disabled. For other blogs, they would get the message, Bandwidth exceeded if they got the amount of traffic I got from posting these misleading posts.

After talking with Hostgator, they allowed my blog back up with the condition that I install WP-Super cache to help limit the number of requests to the server. Basically, the wordpress plug-in WP-Super cache…

WP-Super Cache helps lessen the load on your blog and your host by caching the pages. Originally, this is how wordpress works. Every page you have is dynamically generated based on a template by wordpress. Just imagine having a skeleton and then for each page that you view, wordpress would get its data from the database and then fill up your skeleton to bring you a page. Every page has different data but the same skeletal structure (sorry for being so redundant).

The problem here is when there are a lot of people viewing your blog especially when they are searching for Hayden Kho’s careless whisper video, so the server gets overloaded with request to fill up the skeleton then it gets tired and eventually dies out. Of course, the technical people in hostgator won’t allow this so to protect their server, they killed the problem which unfortunately was my blog.

Here is where WP-super cache can help you. This plug-in basically takes a snapshot of your blog posts and stores it into a file. The first time a person visits your page, the blog will request data from the database then save a snapshot of it into a file. The second person who visits the same blog post will be getting the snapshot of the post instead of requesting data again from the database. This will also happen to the 3rd, 4th, 5th visitor until the snapshot expires. The expiration depends on your preferences; by default it is around 1 hour but I set it to one day.

With this plug-in, even if 10000 users visit my blog in one day period, only the first person will cause the blog to request data while all others will get the snapshot. This is pretty cool and I hope this solves my blog’s earlier problem which got it disabled. Try wp super cache if you haven’t.

I would like to say thank you to the following (aka just like celebrity endorsing something):

• Hostgator – for my blog and informing me why they disabled my blog. They were approachable and fast to reinstate my blog.
• WP-Super Cache – for the instant solution of getting my blog enabled again.
• Perverts – for bringing my blog down. This is a good stress test for my blog.
• Hayden Kho – well, it all started with your videos which “leaked”

Thanks all! Bow!