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!