Fowler

Hey Have you added any new plugins since the slowness started? Some wordpress plugins are quite resource intensive and can add seconds on to page loads... especially if you get a fair amount of traffic. With Wordpress being slow, plugins seem to quite often be the cause in my experience.

Hi, It would be best to make a support ticket, You will get a faster response and they should be able to restore your sites from a backup. These issues are usually caused by insecure/outdated scripts, weak passwords or someone getting hold of your cPanel or FTP password. Hope you get your sites back up again

You need to upload the directories and the contents. If the directories already exist, it will just upload the contents. The quickest way to upload all the files is through FTP using a program lie Filezilla.

I am not sure what art you are failing at but phpbb mods are as simple as downloading the mod, unzipping it and opening the install.xml file in your browser. Then you just upload the files to where it tells you and then you copy and paste the sections of code where it tells you. Make sure you do the template edits aswell and clear the cache through the acp.

You can password protect the directory they are in to stop people from accessing the directories with your outdated scripts in. I do see alot of 404 errors in the logs of bots searching for certain directories which have never existed on our sites but the malicious bots crawling the internet are just hoping that they do exist. Quite often they try /cart, /wordpress, /vb and loads of wp-content/themes/**theme name**/thumb.php. They just hope that something exists in those directories and that it is a script they can exploit. While you may not link to them, they may still be found. I am sure if you buy a new domain and setup a forum at /forum, it will be spammed at some point even if you never link to the forum.

Hi Rudy, Have you started a support ticket regarding the issue? They might be able to help clean up your account. Usually I would recommend restoring a backup from before your site was compromised but judging from your post, I am guessing you are not sure how long your site has been compromised for? I would imagine that this was down to an outdated script being compromised although I can't say for certain. Ideally you shouldn't leave unused scripts publicly accessible as it just increases the attack surface. Outdated scripts make it even more likely for your site to be compromised aswell. I think seeing if HH has any handy tools they can use to "spring clean" your account and un installing all unused scripts and updating ones that you want to keep is the way forward. Also if you have any plugins/addons/extensions for any of the scripts you keep, update them also. Quite often they can open up your site to be compromised. One other option you have is to reinstall the scripts you want to keep after you remove all the old scripts. That will help remove any code that has been added to those files.

This is not an official answer but it is probably due to cost. There is probably not a great deal of Chinese customers yet and it is just not possible for them to offer Chinese support aswell as other languages.

In my experience over the past 4 years (ish) is that more often than not, you will get a reply in less that an hour. It may not always get sorted in that first reply but usually if it is a small issue it will be sorted and if it is a bigger problem then you will be in the process of getting it sorted within a hour usually.

I have sent you a PM a few hours ago with details of a method I use on a php based site to stop malicious people/bots sucking up bandwidth.

You could block them via .htaccess - http://www.wizcrafts.net/chinese-blocklist.html If it is a php site you want to block them from then I may have another solution aswell which I can give you if you need it.

Hi, This isn't an official answer but I would imagine they need this evidence in cases where an order is flagged as possibly being fraudulent or if an order comes from a high risk country. They need to do this to protect themselves. I am sure Brian will help you out soon.

Hi, Your site works fine for me and I can see your Wordpress installation. It is probably just a case of you needing to wait a bit longer for the name server changes to take effect for you.

Hi In the public_html directory, create a file called robots.txt and add the following to the file: User-agent: Browsershots Disallow: If you already have a robots.txt file then add the above code to the file. You can view more information here - http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

Hi, Regarding the domain, ensure you select "I will update my nameservers on an existing domain Or I will register a new domain." on the domain options page. Then you are able to enter the extension without issue. Regarding the second question, It shouldn't be a problem I believe.

It is currently the weekend so it will mean that it will take a bit longer to get a reply. Aslong as you have submitted a ticket, it will get sorted.

There is not alot of active members here and probably not all people downloading them are members. Guests could download them but not easily comment. Also some might have given up scrolling past your massive signature to find the reply box.

It is common practice for company to attract customers with discounts for a set period and then after that period require users to pay full price. You can't really expect HH to be any different in that respect. A way around it is to use a reoccurring discount coupon when signing up and while you may get a smaller discount, you will get it for multiple years which is always nice when it comes to renewal time. Of course for you to really get the benefits over one time coupons, you do need to stay with the company for a longer period of time which is not always possible. It is a risk you have to decide if you want to take though unless you just swap hosts every year but even that has it's own issues.

Have you tried a Wordpress Plugin such as W3 Total Cache - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/ Caching = lower CPU usage Lower CPU Usage = Faster Site Also be careful about what plugins you install. Some plugins can be badly coded or have heavy queries that can cause issues with your resource usage.

Most of the time it is issues with individual sites being "hacked" and not the host's server. I would start a support ticket and let the support team look into it. It may be that an FTP account of yours has been compromised or something like that that the host can't really be held responsible for.

By the sound of Brian's reply in your last topic, you are using alot of CPU constantly causing your site to be limited quite often. It sounds like you must have some very CPU intensive (or badly coded) plugins for Wordpress or receive a fair amount of traffic to your site. I would also assume that you are not using a caching plugin. That might help reduce your CPU usage and therefore stop your site being limited. Also make sure you are running the latest version of Wordpress also. A useful caching plugin for Wordpress in my experience is W3 Total Cache - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/ Also it is better to only have one topic about an issue otherwise replies and information gets lost/forgotten and it gets confusing.

Thanks you very much Brian... It was a great read I am sure skydiving is enjoyable and a great buzz but I could never get myself out of a plane when it is in the air. I have great respect for anyone that does it.

Did they offer any suggestions as to what the problem is? I tried your site earlier and it was slow although it is now working ok.

Fair point. I was thinking of it more from a non support view rather then actual help to solve those common issues. It was more about wondering what the common problems are rather then solutions although if you are writing about the common problems, you may aswell write solutions and put them in the KB so I see your point. Thanks, I will look forward to it

Personally, I don't take much notice of the CPU usage graphs. Reason being (in my experience) is that over the course of an hour it does hit 100% occasionally during the space of that hour however it may have only hit 100% once during that hour for a second or 2 (from my understanding) so doesn't cause any noticeable issues. Recently we had severe issue with speed of our site where the site would be slow for hours at a time on a daily basis taking sometimes more then 30 seconds to load. Usually this used to happen when our site wasn't at the busiest. After many support tickets, vague and unhelpful replies and support staff saying it was down to us hitting 100% of our CPU allowance, it seems that us hitting 100% was not the cause... especially when we were not hitting 100% during the periods of slowness. While support were saying it was the case, i could see the server load getting high and memory usage of the server doubling when we faced these issues. All of a sudden after our site was down for hours one evening, the problem was fixed and we haven't seen any slowness on the site since. For that reason I don't feel that hitting these limits are too big of a problem unless you hit the limits often and I do feel that support can be too quick to assume that is the cause of an issue while there is a bigger problem.

It is not as bad as it used to be prior to upgrading to IPB. Also there is no way to stop spammers 100% and human spam is increasing so there always will be some spam. Adding a check against the stopforumspam.com database to check emails against the database upon signup might be useful. The biggest issue is that spam posts tend to be visible for a very long time. The current spam posts have been visible for around 12 hours.