Ah, the joys of blogging. I was far from thrilled to find an email in my inbox shortly after nine o’clock this morning telling me that my site was enduring a massive spam attack. My site faces vast quantities of spam, often even hundreds of them an hour, thousands of them a day. The more the site grows, the greater the number of attacks. This particular deluge was apparently big enough that it was dragging down the entire server and my site would have to be taken down, suspended, until I could deal with it. This strikes me as being a little bit like removing a splinter with a chainsaw–it’s the right idea but a tad more forceful than necessary. A phone call to the technical support gurus did nothing but assure me that they would deal with this as soon as they could. Oh, but that department isn’t available for another few hours. Here’s the catch: the company wants me to deal with the problem, but they lock out my account and all access to the server. Interesting strategy.
I called back a few minutes ago and sweet-talked my way into having the site re-opened. The person who insisted he did not even know where the abuse department was, mysteriously found his way to them and had the account re-opened nearly instantaneously.
Anyways, I trust and hope that things are returning to normal and that there will be no more problems. For the time being I have removed the ability to send a trackback to my site, so don’t expect to be able to do that for the next little while. I am having to face the fact that budget hosting can only work for so long and I will have to upgrade to something a little more robust. As you might expect, this will come with a price tag, though thankfully it should not be too terrible. A few months ago I had to change my commenting system to deal with site growth and now I’ve had to remove trackbacks. Lousy, dirty spammers! As a friend said this morning, “These days you could probably add spammers to the list of those you are doing battle against: Spammers, rulers, powers, world forces, etc…”
But I will be thankful that the site continues to chug along and that it has been brought back to life. This morning I felt a little bit like a person who went for a walk and returned home to find that someone had broken in and stolen his journal. I feel better now that it has been given back to me!
