As regular readers know, this website has been experiencing some significant issues over the past couple of days. For long stretches, the website was down, and certain pages have been unavailable throughout this period.

Why? That’s the tricky part. I’m not a tech guy, but as best I can tell, there were two issues:

1) Server trouble

The site is run on HostGator, and their customer support has been as effective as the Cowboys defense. I was informed that HG had temporarily restricted access to MySQL, which turned into several long stretches of temporary restrictions. I was also told that HG could not tell me what the problem was.

Initially, I was told that I had too many active plugins. I was using 20 plugins, and all seemed pretty useful, but I deactivated a few in hopes of fixing this problem. It did not. It may have been because traffic has been spiking (good news/bad news!), or it could be because I was using too many resources. I was basically told to go figure it out myself.

One solution would be to move the account to a dedicated server. A cheaper option would be to figure out how to optimize MySQL resource usage. I’ve also been told by some friends that there are even “simpler” solutions, including using a caching plugin. So I’ve tried doing that now, too, although that of course involves using another plugin.

Right now, the site is working just fine. And I’ve got a caching plugin going, which hopefully works. I also have tried to deactivate some other plugins. Will this fix the problem? I have no idea.

How you can help

I have no tech experience. When I started this site a little over two years ago, my biggest concern was the tech side of things. I’ve been able to survive with only a few bumps along the way, but I could really use a few helping hands. If you know are a developer, or understand what MySQL resource usage means, or have thoughts on how to fix things, they would be greatly appreciated. And if you can provide help with issue #2, that would be great, too.

2) Spammers

One IP address in Turkey tried to access the site 1210 times in one hour. This was the cause of the most recent restriction imposed by HG, and I think HG for actually telling me the reason this time. They also went ahead and banned that IP address.

Has this been happening before? Are other IP addresses trying to spam the site? As I understand it, certain countries are notorious for this, so some similar sites have been any IP address from those countries. To the extent you guys could help me figure out how to do this, or if this is an issue for my site, that would be great, too (I think you can do this in Cpanel, although again, this is not my area of expertise).

Summary

I could use some tech help. I’m doing my best to keep things running, but I have a day job that demands a significant amount of my time. As you can imagine, writing takes up quite a bit of time, too. As a result, there’s no time left over for me to handle tech issues. What’s the solution? I’m working on a couple, but a great short-term solution would be if any Football Perspective fans could offer some tech guidance.

Thanks, and I apologize for the intermittent site issues over the past few days.

Chase