Angry !
Finally back online ! I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience, but my website has been suspended for a week, and there was nothing I could do about it,
The website got offline Friday last week. Since it had happened earlier for 1 or 2 days (without any word from my host), I didn’t really think about a suspension but more about technical issues from their part. Still, I tried to have a closer look, and looked for informations like “we are experiencing …”. Nothing like that. No documentation whatsoever about what might have caused such disruption. It is possible to log in and get details about one’s own account, so I did, and tried a funny link called “Reactivate your personal web pages (in case of a suspension only)”. I got a page telling that my account wasn’t suspended. Good for me, let’s just be patient, then.
Not very patient still, I finally found a way, on Monday, to contact my host about the matter. I got confirmation of my request being handled immediately (automatic answer), but a real answer came only on Thursday evening. Here is a translation of it:
“Your website has been blocked. Reason : MySQL database being polluted with spam. We renamed one of your tables.
Thanks for going to your account management page and click on ‘Reactivate your personal web pages’.
You just need to set up protection measures against spam.”
I have to admit that the person I was in relation with was very polite and professional (I mean in customer relation handling), but I’m still very angry.
Why ? because it was totally unfair and disproportionate ! I checked carefully. I found that renamed table. It was the WordPress comment table. It did contains some spam comments, but only very small amount, and they were all marked by Akismet plugin as being spam, which means that they would have been eliminated on my next login in my website (usually, the same day).
“You just need to set up protection measures against spam.” Like I haven’t already !
I’ll try to contact the admin about it, I’ll keep you updated. Right now, I’m thinking of changing host. It’s sad, because I’ve been here for some years now, but if it can’t be helped …
Sorry again for this disruption, I hope it won’t happen too often. See you !
UPDATE:
After consulting the support forum (usenet style) of my host, I discovered that a few (unsaid and unwritten) rules apply. Among them, I’m not supposed to make stats about my site myself o_O . Funny then, that they complained about a handful of spam comments but not about the tens of thousands of entries in my webcounter. Obviously, I took off the webcounting service, and dropped the concerned tables. I’ll make a package for those who want such solution in a few days, since the tool needs some improvements anyway.
I’m quite down, the webcounter wasn’t the best, but it was mine.