Spammers, may you rot in hell.

I just survived a vicious spam attack that resulted in the site being down for three days. I guess that in the relative sense, this isn’t so long, nor is a spam attack the worst thing that can happen to a person, but I have been aggravated as hell about this. The sheer quantity of spam resulted in hogging all kinds of CPU over at my host, which they did not enjoy. It seems like the rapid fire spamming was too fast for Spam Karma to handle and the whole thing just choked. My host suspended the site.

The whole experience was mighty frustrating for me. The guys that took my call really tried to help, but they weren’t the ones who ultimately had the ability to switch my database back on. They couldn’t tell me how much over my CPU allottment I’d gone, or even how much I was allowed. They couldn’t tell me when my database would be back up. And they couldn’t arrange for the dbase to be dropped to me so I could check it out.

I found out it had been reinstated today when I tried to log in One More Time. My tech support brother (I don’t mean brutha, I mean brother, we actually have the same parents) pulled a backup of the entire dbase – I’d already sucked down the content table. Unfortunately, this may mean I go back to Fort Knoxing the site and require registration for commenters. For that, I’m really sorry. I’m going to start by trying some other stuff, but if you find yourself having to register, please understand why. I heart you, I just really really really really hate spam.

In the meantime, here is what I say to you: Back up your content. Back up your content. Back up your content. The most stressful thing about this whole event was knowing that the only place I had all my content was on my host’s servers. How stupid is that? Really stupid.

Anyhoo, it’s all better now. Whew. Back to your regularly scheduled blathering on about everything.

3 thoughts on “Spammers, may you rot in hell.”

  1. Actually, it was trackback spam. And the problem wasn’t so much stopping it as it was that there was SO much of it at once that SpamKarma couldn’t process it. There were nearly 6000 TB spams sitting in my WordPress database.

    Reply
  2. Wow, sorry to hear you had to go through that. (I’m just catching up on blogs after a busy week.) I, for one, will of course be happy to register to continue to make comments here. 🙂

    Reply

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