Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto
Wordless Wednesday
Church kills or church kills stress? Whatever could this sign mean?
I needed a good laugh after the week I’ve been through what with my sites going down and having to change servers etc. See the post below for more info. Talk about stress!
If you’ve found any more funny signs please feel free to send them to me. I’m sure I can use them in a post at some time or another.
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I guess some of you might have wondered what happened to me and all of my sites.
Tricia’s Musings and the rest of my little network went down sometime Sunday morning much to my horror and dismay. As many of you probably know already, when you’d come to visit my site all you’d see was a message that the account was suspended!
How embarrassing!
I had people writing to me wondering if I didn’t pay the bill. Uh huh. I’d paid the bill just two days before! It was automatically paid every month.
Nope. It seems that my site was perhaps attacked on Sunday morning and as a result of the attack it overused the processors on my former web hosting service. So instead of giving me a chance to rectify the problem or without even telling me the exact cause of the problem they just pulled the plug on my account. 10 websites down just like that.
Needless to say I was extremely upset.
I didn’t have any recent back ups of my sites, and well, as you know, I often blog so much each day on all of my sites that I’d pretty much need to back up daily if I really wanted to be sure I had a full copy of my sites at all times.
Sunday was also Superbowl Sunday so I didn’t really even get much information from the company that shut me down until after 11 pm Sunday evening. GRRRRR
The company agree to create a full back up of my sites and supply it to me the following day. Ok, I guess that was pretty much all I could ask. Of course I didn’t get the back ups until about 4 pm on Monday.
In the meantime I went hunting for a new web hosting company, and once I had my back ups set out to restore my sites, and transfer my three domains over to the new hosting site.
Ten websites- 9 with MySQL databases – is not an easy move to make quickly. I worked through the night Tuesday night getting all my sites unpacked on the new server and had my huge 13 year old website up and running by about 3 am Tuesday morning. I didn’t get all of the rest up and running- thanks to some problems I had with the MySQL files until about 6 pm Tuesday evening.
I haven’t slept much since Sunday and I expect that I’ll have a good sleep tonight now that the work is done.
I think I might have had a huge spam attack on Sunday but I don’t know what caused the problem since my former host won’t tell me. For all I know they are lying to me. My sites have been going down and having intermittent service for several months – on the old host, they forgot to renew one of my domains last Summer and twice my directories were broken into … so, over all – I’m glad I moved.
Anyway, just in case it was a spam attack that I went through I’ve installed Bad Behavior on all of my WordPress blogs. It stops spam before it happens. If you’ve been noticing that you are getting 100, 200 or even more spam each day like I was then it’s time to give Bad Behavior a try. It works right along side Akismet without any problems and it’s as easy to install as any other WordPress plugin. Oh it works on other blogging platforms or PHP platforms as well- I’m just talking about how it works with WordPress because that’s what I use for my blogs.
The biggest piece of advice that I’d like to give everyone from my experience is that if you have your own domain and have a web hosting service hosting your sites please make sure to back up your sites regularly. Weekly would be good. You just never know when something like this might happen, because as you might know, a hosting service can cancel your account at anytime and if they don’t give you a backup of your sites like my former host did for me you will be up a creek without a paddle! Protect yourself. Do regular backups and keep a copy on your computer.
Oh BTW my former web hosting service was EmaxHosting.com – I’m not giving them a link. Their service has been going downhill for 8 or more months – read what I said above- account compromised, site going down daily, and then suspending my account without an adequate reason. You do not want to do business with them. If you do- well, consider yourself warned. I’m not the only unhappy customer. I know I’m not.
I decided to go with Lunarpages and I’m paying half the price for even more service, space and bandwidth than I had with my former host. They also helped me via telephone three times in the last two days. So far so good!
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This is one of the roses that I grow in my front flower bed. Obviously it’s not blooming right now. It’s covered in a couple of inches of snow, and it’s freezing outside at -16 Celsius! That’s cold!
Since it’s so cold I’m trying to remember why I was complaining about the heat last summer. I think I’d rather be too hot than too cold. Easy for me to say at this time of year isn’t it?
Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information.
I’ve been tagged! This is the second time dear ol’ Daisy has tagged me. I’m going to have to bribe her to stop tagging me or something.
This meme is a little different. I’m sure many of you have seen the 5 random things memes going around. Well this one is also a 5 random things meme but it has a twist. This time the meme asks you to write about “5 random things that happened because of blogging“. I can do that.
1. I’ve been blogging for a little over a year now and I’ve met so many wonderful people. Some have become friends. Friends that I’d love to visit some day, and that I’d happily welcome into my home if they came to visit.
2. I started blogging because I’m home sick. I wanted to start doing it to fill my time, and I also thought that maybe writing about what was going on in my life – particularly illness wise – would help me in some way by just getting it out. It turns out that I really don’t want to talk about my illness all that much – except to occasionally say I’m not feeling well. I’ve got a lot of other things to say, and it has filled my time quite nicely. In fact I’m probably too busy now with all my blogging activities.
3. Continuing on from #2 – When I discovered that I had a lot to say I created more blogs about specific topics- Gardening, Photography, Celebrity gossip etc. Now I have 6 blogs that keep me very busy. Too busy!
4. My husband and I do a lot of things together. I guess we do most things together, but I never expected that we’d end up blogging together! He’s got two blogs on the go now and I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up starting another one sometime in the future too. He also helps me out by surfing on the traffic engines for me when I’m working on my sites. I think that might have been what got him interested in doing his Guitar blog since he was stopping and reading so many blogs while surfing.
5. I’ve always made a little bit of extra money from my two websites, but by creating and maintaining several blogs I’ve perhaps quadrupled my Internet earnings. I really needed to do that too since I’m still sick at home with no income from my place of work coming in. One of the major ways that I’ve been making money has been through Payperp0st. Chris also writes for Payperp0st and between us we’ve made about $4000 since October. Isn’t that great?
Now … who to tag. Who to tag … I think I’ll tag Shelli, Fab, Andy from Sans Pantaloons, Zed, and Beth. I choose to tag these people because I think that blogging has changed their lives in many ways, and I think they’ll be able to create some interesting posts for us to read.
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This weeks Theme is GROSS
I think there’s probably going to be an awful lot of interesting interpretations of the theme this week. This would be a great day to go through the Photo Hunter blogroll and visit all the sites.
To me, this is just gross. Paris Hilton is butt ugly in this outfit. Her body looks out of proportion … arms way too long, body way too long … very odd. So yeah, this is my interpretation of this weeks them. Paris is gross!