The Knitting Fiend

I’ve been satisfied with my web hosting service for many years. But right now, they are driving me nuts!

If you don’t want to read this rant: Please, if the images aren’t showing on your browser, let me know!! (In comments as well as email. The rant will explain why.)

Now, the rant:

I know I’m being a bit unfair. It’s obvious my web host is trying to install new and better things. Over the past month, I keep seeing new things appear at my site control panel: Spam filters at the host level. Hot link protection for people who don’t want to deal with htaccess files. Some mysterious thing called “Leech Protection.”

Do they email to tell us when they are installing stuff? No. They used to email. This year, the company was sold to a new company. The new company’s policy seems to be to not bother customers with these pesky details.)

Not emailing might not be a problem. But, often when they install something, my site disappears for 15 minutes to 4 hours! My email is interrupted; some is lost. (Sorry if I don’t answer your question; I probably never got the email. Beside, the spam filter seems mysterious and may be filtering stuff I don’t want it to filter. . . )

This has been happening regularly since Thanksgiving.

What happened today? I visited the site using internet explorer and none of the images were loading! What good are my how tos with no pictures?! Or the Haiku’s commenting on knit designs?

Sigh…

Ok. Luckily I remembered they’d installed “hot link” protection. This is supposed to “automatically” recognize my sites and put these urls in a “white list”. This supposedly permits my pages (or at least those on the white list) to show photos, while preventing hot-linking by other sites. But. But.

But, the “automatic” feature is a bit glitchy. It somehow white lists all sorts of spammy URLs! Are my sites on the white list? NOOOOO! My own site (and blog) are blocked from loading my own images!

Ok, so I found the hotlink protection sometime soon after they first installed it. I deleted all the spammy sites from the white list and added my own urls and saved the new white list. Then, as a further precaution, I disabled the “protection” several weeks ago. (Since I already block using an htaccess file, I don’t need it.)

But, yesterday, the technicians at my host were doing something. (I know this because the site didn’t load on and off for several hours. I contacted them and there was some issue with “the data center”.)

When they finished whatever they had done, they not only re-enabled the hot-link “protection” , but they had deleted my short “white list” and reinserted the spammy urls! So, I visit my site, and no images.

It took me a little while to figure out what had happened. That was a pain in the neck!

So… if anything is missing or looks “wrong” let me know. (And because of the whole “spam filter eating email issue”, post in comments in addition to emailing me. Sigh. . . )