This is the documentation, with funny added gifs of the Hell that I have experienced for this past week. You don’t have read the whole thing…I just had to do this. But, if you wouldn’t mind, just let me know that you see the site, without any problems and it seems ok (in the comments) – it would make my day.
I should start a new meme, just not on Thursday. Have I mentioned that Thursday is my biggest day, based on BB101 in the morning and #FF in the evening? Given that fact, I usually crash and burn on Thursdays.
Last Thursday it went down and I have not really gotten back in my blog until today. I wrote the piece about the attacks on the BB101 yesterday. And then everything crashed…I couldn’t even get in my site. Until then it had happened intermittently, yesterday it was a lock-out.
I tried everything. I poked, I prodded, I rewrote my php.ini file (something I shouldn’t ever do!) – I even contemplated uninstalling wordpress and bringing my whole site down, clearing my server and then trying to reinstall. I was getting manic. My husband was looking at me like he was about to call a divorce lawyer cause I was a bit cray-cray…I think I cried on the phone with the GoDaddy lady, Roxanne, or April, maybe it was Jourdan, or could have been the Alex guy…
I deleted my theme, I deleted all my plugins — and still nothing. I Still couldn’t get into my wp-admin area. Nothing. The server was reset. Each time. The last guy at GoDaddy had told me it might be an ISP issue, because he wasn’t seeing my site down…just me. I was tragically under-whelmed. You know what Cox was going to do when I called them and told them there were issues with my network?
Nope, not going to accept that answer. It couldn’t be. I have three domains, all on different host accounts, only parajunkee.com was getting reset. That is not my ISP. I bought a new domain parajunkee.info – installed it on the same host, installed wordpress in that domain area – and guess what. Same issue. Ha! It had to be my hosting account.
Call back.
Wait while the ever helpful Jourdan (don’t ask me if I spelled it right) went back and forth with tech support, until finally he asked me the magic question. What is your IP address? Ding. Ding. Ding. Why is this the first time we are thinking of this!! It was so obvious, I was being blacklisted from my own site. The reason why I couldn’t access it but other people could.
Granted, I’m not like a database person, but it made sense. Increased activity of spam on my site would lead to a lot of IP addresses being blacklisted, I had used a plugin to whitelist my own IP but that would prevent GoDaddy’s security from blacklisting my IP.
I believe it did the trick. So hopefully you guys can learn from my mistakes and downtime. You can get blacklisted.
How to prevent this:
Have spam prevention on your site, Askimet is still the #1 spam comment filter
Have a security plugin on your site, I’m currently going with Wordfence, but I am going back and forth between Better WordPress Security also.
I’ve also installed an htpasswrd file on my site, but that is for the more technically savvy, one ” gave Internal Server Errors on my site. Just one “! This is to prevent what is called Brute Force Login attempts.
I know a few people say that I wouldn’t have these issues if I would go with a Dedicated WordPress Host, but frankly this is the first time something like this has happened to me since 2010 when I started using GoDaddy, so it seems they are few and far between and I handled it — and I handled it myself. Giving me the feeling of SUPREME KNOWLEDGE CONFIDENCE and awesome web superpowers!!! Too much?
It’s the Eye of the Tiger baby…
Lesson learned:
Be persistent with your host, don’t be afraid to call them over and over again. They don’t care that you are calling them, they are sitting there waiting for your call. Search the forums, other people might have the same problem! Tell the customer service everything! I finally was persistent saying I could login to my other sites, something I had not told the last guy.
And as an added bonus I did download WordPress 3.6 and supposedly I can just put the url here and this happens…