So, I’ve been hosted at the same company (sort of) for over 2 years now. The reason that I went with Friendlier.com as my website host is because of the uptime reported for their service (independently) and the reasonable price for the service. In a world where the price for average shared web hosting is between $2.99 and $8.99 a month, I found one that charged $4.95 per month. Plus, I could transfer my domain name to them and get it included in the price. All in all,it appeared to be a good deal.

It was. So, I transferred my domain away from DNBuy.com to Friendlier.com and life was good. I dropped the $8.97/year fee for the domain and went upon my way. I must say that transferring away from this company was not without its issue. The owners of DNBuy took forever to respond to my request for an EPP code so that I could begin the transfer process. In fact, as I remember it,they didn’t actually respond to my emails (and there were lots of them). I ended up looking up their contact number on their own Whois records (as they didn’t have a working number printed on their website) and calling them. I got someone out of bed (at 11am) and left a pleasant but insistent instruction for them to comply with my request. I got my EPP key.

Now, the hosting with Friendlier.com was great. They emailed me twice when they were going to have to take the site down, due to a need for a computer reboot. The outages were planned and around 10 minutes each. They were even receptive when I asked them to compile Xcache into PHP so that WordPress and other PHP-based sites would take less strain on the server.

As is often the case, good things can come to an end. Friendlier.com was bought by Vivahost.com. The management was remote before and that didn’t change, as the ownership of the company left the USA for Bulgaria. Through the magic of the internet, my website can be hosted in Dallas, Texas while the host is being administered from Gabrovo, BG and I can wok my site from Eastern Canada. Cool.

The problem is that there was some down time. My site went “dark” a few times without explanation for hours at a time. Once it was down for over a day. On that occasion, I finally got the explanation that my site was the source of spamming. This was news to me (and to anyone who’s been reading my drivel), as I hate the practice and actively work to prevent it. After further investigation, the admin agreed that the source wasn’t my directory after all and they turned my account back on. By turning back on, I mean recreated my account, as they’d deleted it. So, I took my recent back up and restored my site.

This happened again two more times. Obviously, the server wasn’t being paid close enough attention. Because my site is the most developed one on the server, I must have been the first choice. Anyway, I got this resolved and most of the troubles were past. Then, they wouldn’t acknowledge that they took my money. I believe that this was a confusion between the billing software and the sales staff, as the human beings that answered my tickets (by the way, Friendlier.com had a live chat that Vivahost had removed for a long period) insisted that they were aware of my payment but the billing software kept emailing me threats. After about a month, this issue was finally resolved.

All of this didn’t sit well with me, as I’d had a hard time in the past with hosting reliability and I thought that this one was going to be stable. Compared to others, it is, I guess. So, I decided to transfer my domain away from this host, partly for the power that I have with my current registrar and partly because I am a bit nervous about a continued business relationship with this host and my domain name, which happens to be my name. I didn’t want to have it held for ransom (and I wouldn’t have – I’d have let it go and re-registered it after the redemption period was up – 45 days without a site name is worth it).

After much foot dragging and a little bit of “fishy” business, I got my domain transferred away from my web host. I will remain hosted here as long as I continue to have reliable uptime but I want the “safety” of having my domain and my hosting with different companies again. Plus, its easier to keep track, as I have more than one domain.

All of my business with web hosting and domain registration has been done with small “mom and pop” businesses. I know that the industry is competitive and its hard to make a decent living at it while providing a great experience for your clients. So, I am doing this “with my eyes open” and realize that I may have to accommodate for someone else’s bad business decision down the road.

The “cool” part is the back end of the new WordPress 3.0 beta 1. I’ve been running stable code here for a while and decided to contribute to some bug hunting again. I think that anyone with a WordPress site will be impressed with the features that are about to be unleashed. I’m not so sure that this release should be called “beta”, as its still got some breakages, but they seem to be UI related. Let me know, though, if the site’s not behaving as it should. Oh, and hey. If you want to vent by ridiculing the odd human spammer that gets through my filters, go ahead. But be waned that I may not keep the spammer’s comment or any of your insults to him/her. I might, however, return to a somewhat regular writing schedule if I can decided what content goes here.

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So its mine again and “cool”

I’ve been trying to figure out the best balance between Spam filtering and freedom to comment on this site. The day before yesterday, in the evening, I decided to conduct an experiment and see what the results were.

What was here

Before conducting the experiment, I’d been using the same solution that I had before. Akismet and Tan Tan Noodles Simple Spam Filter had been my trusty resistance fighters who tirelessly kept my site pretty much free from comments made by that scourge of the earth known as blog spammers. I’ve been reasonably happy with this dynamic duo as the amount of work required by me was pretty low and people who wanted to could comment freely on this site and see their comment appear right away. I didn’t have to manually approve the comments and the person who commented didn’t have to do anything elaborate to have their comment appear here.

The Experiment

I had decided to see what would happen if I disabled Joe Tan’s Simple Spam Filter.I wanted to know two things – how many comments actually do get moderated because of their spammy nature, and, how many of those comments are legitimate. I’ve been quite lucky so far. About once or twice a week, there’d be a comment added to the list of spam comments in my moderation queue – and, it was put there because it should have been.

As I alluded to with my previous post, I enabled first comment moderation, in case Akismet wasn’t up to the task. Over night, I had received 14 comments that had been sent to the queue and they were all sent there with good reason. They were illegitimate crapola and should have been set on fire and fed to their owners. That part of the experiment seemed to have gone well.

Then, for the bigger risk. I disabled first comment moderation to see if Akismet would handle everything and do it correctly. I didn’t really want to have to go through a pile of comments and delete them from the published site. Over the next 16 or 17 hours, I received 64 comments that were marked as spam. They were waiting for me in the spam queue. I read through them all and determined that they had been legitimately flagged as spam comments.

So, Akismet had saved me from the spammers. This is great! On the face of things, there was no real difference to those who read the content here.

The Conclusion and My Action

I’ve concluded that Akismet can be the only spam moderation solution that you really need on your site. It seems to filter the illegitimate comments properly and doesn’t flag any false positives. The things that get filtered are queued for me to review, if necessary, in case they were put there in error. It does a great job.

I’ve enabled Simple Spam Filter again, though, as the way it works is a great compliment to Akismet. It was not decided as a single solution, but rather a prefilter for Akismet. This task is handled well. With SSF enabled, I don’t have to search through the spam queue to see if any comments there are legitimate. And, don’t kid yourself, if you have a list if quarantined comments, you’ll go through them, just to be sure.

With SSF, comments with more than 5 links get stopped and any comments with Regex code in them gets stopped. As well, comments with words commonly used by spammers are stopped. The good new is that, if someone gets stopped by the filter, they have a chance to moderate their own comment as approved by clicking the button on the page showing them why their comment was blocked. Then, the comment goes through. I don’t have to worry about reading through the Akismet queue often, as the really obvious robot-generated spam is deleted automatically, as the robot doesn’t click the button to allow their comment to be read. Once a spam commenter gets past the SSF by clicking through the first block, they get caught by Akismet. The positive thing for me is that I don’t have to actively pore through several comments just to find out they’re spam and need deleting. The robots’ inaction at the gateway is enough.

The potential is there for every comment to pass SSF, as the moderation is handled by the commenter. I think that this is pretty good evidence that there is a problem. My little site gets more illegitimate comments in one day than the number of articles I publish in a whole year.

This experiment has solidified my feeling that I’ve chosen the best solution for my needs. So, SSF and Akismet remain as my dynamic freedom fighting duo. I did remove a few words from the potential list (ones that I find that I use a lot). I figure that if they’re used by a spammer, Akismet will stop them or SSF will due to them using another tactic that is blocked before publication.

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The Least Amount of Work

This shouldn’t affect anyone whose commented before. I’ll be working on it for a few days, so bear with me, if your comment is affected. I will get to it.

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Don’t Worry, I See It

I’ve also upgraded my Drupal site. Once I figure out Drupal theming, I may even move this site to Drupal. We’ll see how that goes. From everything that I’ve been reading about it, if you really know how to manage Drupal, you can likely find lots of work in maintaining websites.

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Hic!