My hosting company tells me last week they are going to pull the plug. Too much bandwidth.
(Click on the picture for the largest version.)
Since I’ve already bloviated on every aspect of self defense/home security where I knew what I was talking about, I figured what the hell. Time to let this thing die a quiet death. After all, I hadn’t been posting much anyway. Who would even notice except for a few die hard readers who wouldn’t give up the old ways?
(Picture source.)
(Click on the picture for the largest version.)
I was wrong about that, as the number of comments left on my good-bye post proved. About the same amount of supportive emails were also received. Looks like there are more of you than I thought.
It wouldn’t have happened without the very kind support of Mr. Daniel Scott at Kyndar.net, my new host and a fellow blogger. I’ve deleted all but two posts in order to close off bandwidth drain due to spambots. Looks like I’ll have to start all over from scratch so far as content is concerned. I have no idea how interesting you will find it when I go over old tired ground, but we’ll find out.
Now if you will all excuse me, I have to go write about a bajillion emails so all of you will know I’m back in the game.
PS I was asked what the bandwidth draw my old host was experiencing which caused all the trouble. They told me that this blog generated something close to 45 GB of traffic a month, which was over eleven times the activity of the next most popular site on the server. It was such a chore to keep up with it all that there was noticeable performance slowdown, which cause them to declare a violation of the terms of service.
It seems most of it was due to spambots from China bouncing off my filters. One thing a glance at the old logs shows me I’m in the wrong profession. I had no idea that counterfeit designer handbags were such big business!
Welcome back!
I think the problem is more with your old host; I experienced another couple of weeks of not being able to view any of your entries and it cleared up today.
Welcome back, indeed!
…never took you off my favorites list. Nice going. Looking forward to new posts.
What Siergen said!
gfa
Huzzah!
Glad you got it all worked out.
Back when I was fiddling with this sort of stuff, I found the nuclear approach to traffic filterins was sometimes the best. Ban entire IP netblocks, either using IPTABLES (your host should have some tech savy on that) or in httpd.conf, or in .htaccess. There are some WordPress plugins which might help too, such as badbehavior (hope I’m remembering that one correctly).
James, very glad to hear it’s all alright and you won’t be departing the blogosphere afterall. 🙂
Yay!
reader from Croatia saying: happy you decided to stay.
Good to hear!
If you want your old stuff back, The Wayback Machine has it up to Mar 2, 2013.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://hellinahandbasket.net/
I’m glad you’ve decided to keep writing, James. I always enjoy reading and viewing your various articles, even when it’s just a short one with a photo. Thanks for deciding to keep blogging and making my days more interesting.
I do have a suggestion for dealing with the spammers.
One, turn off all commenting on posts more than a week old.
Two, add the spammer’s IP addreses to the deny section of your htacess file. If they can’t even see you, they can’t pester you.
And you have dealt with three already, by getting a hosting provided that isn’t a retard who counts spambot bounces against bandwidth.
And, yea, you can put a link up to archive.org for folks who want to look at old content.
Spambots can’t read the part where you say you have no money.