Jan 06 2010
My Suzette account was suspended?!
Yesterday, when I was trying to reply to a comment, one moment I could see the comment and the next moment I clicked “Reply”, the whole account was suspended.
I couldn’t get in at all, and no one could see my blog.
I checked with the host, and was informed that this site has compromised the integrity of the hosting server, and was due to unusual spike in traffic. But hor, I checked my statcounter account, nothing unusual wor…
So, the whole evening, my blog was unaccessible. 
And to solve that, I have to pay a premium. Split this blog and SuzetteCooks into 2 individual standard account. Fire-fighting to make decisions and to solve this until midnight.
This is back to the original arrangement when these blogs were originally hosted with LcF. Jason laughed at me when I did that, and recommended me to host these 2 blogs within 1 account and switched host. I took his advice, and wasted quite a lot (paid LcF in full already and of course no refund lah!).
Now, I am reverting back to the same arrangement, but more expensive. I know I am paying for better quality of service, but honestly I am worried about funding.
Now that I have stopped all my link-selling businesses, I have no more new ‘blog fund’ coming in. I used to have steady income of USD70-100 per month, without doing anything. I stopped investing time in selling, it reduced to USD30 per month. To protect my blog from penalized by Google (kena once before), I have decided to stop these incomes altogether since few months ago.
So, I have no more income, yet am paying so much to host the sites. I think I cannot spend my PayPal money that carelessly anymore! Used to think they are easy money, bought lots of goods from eBay, and now not much left!!
Either I stop using them and reserve them for my next few year’s hosting expenses, or re-start selling links again. Hmm… struggle…
I will talk to Bryan and see what is going on. Don’t worry, we can work out something.
All these unusual spike in traffic is not necessarily on your blog’s site visit. It could be some trojans that have infected your blog/webmails that keeps sending out spams or using a lot of processors that caused the spike.
Twinsmom had similar problem lately and Bryan and I have been working to fix it. It’s solved by now after I upgraded all the WordPress, plugins and changed the passwords.
Yea, I agree with Jason that server load spike could be due to vulnerability in plugins or malicious coding planted into the theme as well.
Joe: Until now, we still don’t know what caused the issue. Anyway, Bryan from IXIY has great service. He helped to troubleshoot this and upgraded my hosting account. I didn’t lose much time of my site, as he recovered my site pretty quickly. If you do not have 2 domains sharing an account, that should be safe.