Archive: Opinions

As many of our readers know, the Lansing Star Web site was down a few times last week for various amounts of time.  Over the past couple of weeks we have been working on moving our sites to our own server, and, needless to say, we encountered some challenges.  But I have to give credit where it is due: we have received outstanding support from our new hosting company, Hostoople.  And because of that I am confident that we are close to the smooth sailing I hoped for when we decided to move our sites.

Most Web sites are fine on what they call 'shared hosting', an economical plan in which several customers share a Web server (it is just a computer that is configured to deliver Web sites on the Internet).  My stuff on shared hosting is segregated from your stuff -- I can't see yours and you can't see mine.  But because we share a computer, if my site uses a lot of the machine's resources, it slows down your site.  It's bad manners, kind of like the neighbor with the barking dog who won't do anything to quiet it.

With nine years of content and counting, the Lansing Star and some of our other sites sometimes need a lot of resources, especially when one of our articles gets a lot of hits, as my piece on Giant Hogweed did in our July 4th issue -- it got over 10,000 hits in its week of publication, and continues to get hits because we archive everything live on the site.  I have been thinking that our need for our own server was imminent for over a year.

So we took the plunge a few weeks ago.  We chose Hostoople for two reasons.  First, it is receiving some very good reviews.  Second, the company offered a package that was a better fit for us than our old hosting company, Hostgator, had.  We weren't unhappy with Hostgator -- Hostoople was just a better fit for us.

Because the Star has so much material in it and a lot of customization, it would be very difficult to upgrade the systems we use to bring the Star to you every week.  So we needed some older packages installed on the server, which Hostoople did willingly.  They also jumped through hoops to get our sites that needed the older technology to actually work.  We found we were having a variety of problems on the new server, which they resolved one by one.  Honestly I thought we were going to lose our business directory site, but they made the darn thing work!

It was determined that we needed more memory on our server to solve some of the problems we had last week -- it was installed very quickly.

Then two of our sites were hacked.

This had nothing to do with our new hosting company or server -- it was a coincidence that hackers from Brazil and Dubai decided to go after us while we were settling into our new virtual home.  It has happened before over  the years, and it is never fun when it happens.  Why did they pick us?  Why do they do anything they do?  Dealing with problems like this is an unfortunate part of being on the Internet.

Because I was monitoring the sites for issues relating to our memory problems I caught the hacks pretty quickly, probably avoiding significant damage.  Hostoople support installed a malware scanner on our server and explained to me how to use it.  Wednesday I used the tool to find and kill vulnerabilities on both sites.

I've worried a bit that I have been a pain in the ... er... neck to the support staff, but they have never acted as if that is so.  They just keep fixing whatever needs fixing, and it looks like we are close to the smooth sailing that I dreamed of -- when I could dream -- this has caused more than a few sleepless nights!!!

So this week's issue is a test.  It looks like we have passed the major hurdles.  We're back!

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