Patricia's Planet

My WordPress article directory caused too much load on the server and was suspended yet again on Wednesday and anybody who tried to access it got a forbidden page. This was something like the fifth time for BB Articles recently and I was not happy about it.

As before I got a message telling me to add WP 3 Total Cache and to get rid of some plugins and content. Also that I should consider upgrading to VPS hosting. As before I told them that I already had WP3 Total Cache installed and that one of his nice colleagues had checked it and it was set up ok.

To do something to help I removed all of the comments and turned comments off after scouring the Internet to find out how to do that. Strangely it’s not possible to easily do that with WordPress except for turning comments off anything that is more than one day old.

I like the idea of having comments whether they be feedback or extra information, but unfortunately lunatic spammers have taken over the Internet in droves using software that sends out rubbish comments automatically to thousands of blogs in one session. Some of these idiots use different email addresses and names and send out multiple spam comments every day, they don’t care if it’s relevant they just want to screw you out of the backlinks. Last week one guy broke the record by submitting over 300 spam comments in one day to my blogs. You can get thousands of spam comments to one genuine comment so I don’t see the point of having comments turned on anymore.

Anyway I had noticed an upsurge on my server the day before and that coincided with about 100 spam comments being submitted within a short time of each other, so I have to assume that is part of the problem along with content scrapers.

The site is on my reseller account and I had set the space alloted to 2000 M, but after the problems last week I had upped it to 3000 M. On Tuesday I tried to send an email out from the site and couldn’t because of too much load on the server. I went into my reseller cpanel and found that it was saying that over 3,000 M had been used so I upped it again to 5,000 M. 30 minutes later it was back down to the normal just over 1,000 M used.

It was Wednesday that I found my site was disabled again and it was saying that the site had used over 5,000 M. I spent hours scouring the Internet trying to find solutions as to why it was fluctuating like that and trying to figure out how to turn the comments off. I offloaded a couple of plugins and the site was enabled again. Everything was fine but the next day I got an email from one of the authors saying that he couldn’t login and a message was coming up saying that he didn’t have suffiecient permissions to access this area.

I tried to login with my author account id and sure enough it said the same for me, but I was able to login to my admin account. More hours were wasted trying to solve the problem, but in the end I contacted Hostgator support and asked for their help. Not long afterwards I got this message:

‘It appears that your “Article_Directory” plugin is requiring a permission level of “level_7″ in order to be able to log in to the account. This appears to be granted to “Editor” level users and above. The “Patricia Jones” user appears to only be set to the “Author” level of permission, which is not granted the ability to log into the back end of the site. There have been some recent changes in regards to the user permissions system in the 3.0 branch of wordpress. Have you recently upgraded to this. If so, it may be necessary to obtain an upgrades version of “Article Directory” as well to be compatible with this. Please let us know if you have any further questions.’

The article directory plugin that I was using had been upgraded a few days earlier and I always do the WordPress upgrades for security reasons so that was the cause of the login problem, I’m also wondering if one or more of the authors had tried to login over and over with submission software. Sure enough I found that if I changed authors to editors they could login and submit articles, but they could also edit other peoples articles. Not a good idea so I removed the article directory plugin and authors could then login and submit articles again.

I decided to look into getting VPS hosting but the level recommended costs 4 times what I am currently paying for my reseller account and I’m not sure if VPS will resolve the server overload problem because it is still shared hosting. Also BB Articles isn’t my money site and although all of my other sites would be moved to the VPS hosting I have to get my head round paying more because of a site that doesn’t make that much.

Despite what Internet marketers may think there isn’t a lot of money to be made running an article directory unless you have one of the handful of top directories and plaster the site with Adsense. However, I consider it as my hub site. At PR3 it ranks higher than the others. When I launch a new site I get good backlinks straight away and my articles promoting my other sites get published immediately. So in the scheme of things it is quite important but it isn’t worth spending so much time on it.

I saw a comment on one forum saying that WordPress wasn’t built to run article directories and that got me worried. I used the Article Dashboard script before but WordPress is much better for SEO. There are also a lot of directories out there using WordPress so I’m sure that in time any problems will be ironed out.

I will probably upgrade to VPS very soon, traffic on all of my sites has risen substantially so it won’t be long before an upgrade will be needed. It was suggested to me that I change hosts and pay less for VPS, but Hostgator have been good to me and their customer service is second to none.

I know from searching the Internet that I have had more chances and patience from Hostgator with the server overload problems than some of the other hosting companies give. I’ve seen stories of how it’s happened once with some hosts and they have closed the sites down for good. During the last month I’m sure that I’ve used up more of support’s time than I’ve paid for in that month and even if the server overload problem happens again they will help me rather than complain – yes I will upgrade then to VPS with bells on!

If you are interested in hosting with them use this coupon code YORKSHIREPUD offering $9.94 off your first hosting package  just enter that when you apply for your new hosting account and KERCHING you save on your purchase.

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