Some of you might have noticed that Political Irony has been slow lately, and even been unavailable on and off. Yesterday I found some exploit code that had been hacked into the site and removed it, but it still isn’t behaving well. It has been almost a year since I rebuilt the site from scratch, so it is probably time to do that, but before I do that I have two questions:
I’m currently running Political Irony on a shared hosting service. This blog is really too big for that kind of hosting, but I’ve been reluctant to spend more since I don’t make any money on this site (and don’t really want to). Does anyone know of a hosting service for WordPress blogs that can deal with the traffic and is also relatively cheap? If so, please leave a comment on this post.
Alternatively, is there anyone out there who can host this site and act as sysadmin for it? I’m starting a new job on Monday, and I don’t have much time for the administration duties (updating the software and dealing with spammers and hackers), although I’m happy to keep feeding stories. If anyone is interested please contact “iron” at this domain.
11 Comments
No clue about the wordpress thing but I’ve used Liquid Web several times in my web endeavors and they’ve always been fantastic.
http://www.liquidweb.com/
LGF uses and raves about Hosting Matters as well:
http://hostingmatters.com/
Actually, scratch that. Looking through my notes, I have used liquid web but found them to be just OK (but cheap). I actually started using Fused Network which was more expensive but had better service, which apparently is just Fused now.
http://www.fused.com/
Best wishes with the new gig, yo!
You should have an e-mail from me. If you are lacking that e-mail, please let me know.
May I suggest Squarespace.com?
Where and what was the exploit code.
Robert
Congrats on the new job IK.
Robert, they installed a hidden file .thumbs.php and then modified the .htaccess file to invoke it. New one for me.
Andre, Squarespace looks pretty interesting. Will be some work to adapt my site to their engine, but once I do that it looks like they will take care of everything else. I will probably take advantage of their 14 day trial to see if it will work out.
In case anyone is interested, I’ll be working for these guys.
Congrats on the new job. I love those flight trackers.
A while ago when you mentioned you’d first been exploited I recommended Exploit Scanner.
http://ocaoimh.ie/exploit-scanner/
Did you try it? If you’re using it I find it amazing that you’ve been hacked again. I’ve been using it for years now and it’s quite good.
Just install it and run it and it will show you where the problems are. Many of wordpress’s problems used to happen during automatic updating of the core software but in more recent updates they’ve plugged those holes and auto updating seems to be fine. But, you still need to install and run the scanner to get rid of the hacks.
My recommendation for you and this blog is to use a free hosted service: wordpress.com, tumbler or one of the many others.
That way you’ll be free of this kind of work and the site will be easier to administer, and there will be no cost to you.
I’m quite sure any of the free hosting services can handle your needed bandwidth.
I moved my blog over to GoDaddy.com over a year ago and I have been very happy with it ever since. They do host WordPress blogs and they make it very easy for you to do so. All I did was get a hosting account, get them to set the site up, load in my database and I was all set. I haven’t had any problems with hackers (yet) as they apparently have very secure servers (so far).
The best thing was the price. I got 10GB of storage for my blog for $4.99 a month. No, that is not a misprint – $4.99 a month. Now they have since changed the plans and instead of new customers being able to pay one month at a time you now have to pay for at least three months at a time for $5.99 a month.
That is the Economy Plan where you get the 10GB of storage, unlimited bandwidth, 100 email accounts and 10 MySQL Databases.
http://www.godaddy.com/hosting/wordpress-hosting.aspx?isc=IAPtno47 is the page to go to to get started.
Good luck and congrats on the new job.