Category Archives: Uncategorized

26 Sep

Anyone Else having Issues with VPS

Weird issue on my sites recently. I have one VPS account with Plesk and the ports all get locked in a ‘CLOSE_WAIT’ state. Using ‘netstat -p” shows its usually httpd locking them up. Restarting VPS will get the ports unlocked but in investigation I found restarting Apache from the Unix command line does the trick to.

Anyone have any experience with this type of issue and how to fix it?… Read the rest

10 Sep

One of our sites was hacked

Put in a whole bunch of PPC (pills porn casino) links and we only noticed because the site wasn’t ranking when it should have, and by looking at the source code. The sire is pure HTML, no applications installed. How the heck they got in I don’t know, all I can assume is they got into the box through someone else’s site and added these links. Now I have to spend time cleaning it all up. Were do I send the bill for the cleanup?… Read the rest

10 Sep

Site Performance

The speed your site responds to queries is used as part of the overall ranking algorithm – sites that don’t respond at all are likely to get dropped from search engine indexes. Therefore turning on any performance enhancements you can is a must if you want to maintain rankings.

To that  end I’ve been working on performance on our sites. My previous post was about turning on PHP errors and correcting them. One page on an internal site went from taking a few minutes to render to under 20 seconds all because I had $$var instead of $var in one line in a loop.… Read the rest

27 Aug

Site Stability Issues

We are now back up after being down for nearly a week. The problem was the site had lost its main hard drive. We had a second hard drive and there were backups in place on the second hard drive but the host did not know about them or couldn’t restore them as they should have. They moved us to a new machine and gave us root access, we restored the hosted sites from backups and didn’t lose much of anything.

A friend lost a hard drive on his web site, had no backups and lost a number of sites that were generating good income.… Read the rest

21 Aug

Site Hangs Waiting for External Javascript

This applies to you if you use Google Analytics, or any other third part javascript and your site stops responding whenever the third party site goes down.

One of the main ways this affects users is the page does not display in their browser, and in the lower left of the browser window they see ‘Transfering data from pagead2.googlesyndication.com’

The problem is caused by the script tag being in the <head> section of your site. If you move it to just before the </body> the browser will render your entire page before waiting for the third party site to respond.… Read the rest