TIFU: Well, I'm stupid. I never enabled cloud infrastructure even though I could easily do so for months, and put up with hacking attempts, soft 404s, and foreign scraper bots that I could've shut down in about 5 seconds.

Yes, I never even noticed the Cloud section in my Cpanel until today. I had about two hacking attempts per month. All failed because the people on the other end didn't know the input was sanitized and the content and mailing databases were separate. They almost always ended after I forwarded the email with stripped, unexecuted PHP back to the hackers. I was constantly shuffling around .htaccess files, had to manually crawl because half of my pages overloaded the server and returned soft 404s. I couldn't even accurately gauge my real traffic because the real numbers of consultation request emails wasn't bad for the small local petsitting site I run, but was obscured by the bots that are always trolling for images to steal and resell.

Its not that the servers were slow, its that I didn't have extra capacity during peak crawl days (1st and 30th/31st of every month), and vulnerability sniffers and Asian scraper bots were eating up a huge portion of my bandwidth. Then, in the span of about 5 minutes, I doubled my bandwidth, blocked the countries of India, China, Russia, and Bangladesh, and added some of the best security you can get, all for free. My website was instantly twice as fast, I was even able to increase the quality of some of my optimized images now that I no longer need to worry about squeezing out every bit of performance I can get.

I always assumed that most "extra" sections in my Cpanel were spam from companies my webhost partnered with. For the most part, I was right, pretty much every button I pressed that I didn't recognize signed me up for a free trial or added unwanted content to my sitemap and robots.txt. After a while, I just started ignoring any new sections, and kept my infrastructure years out of date by not enabling new features they added, even ones that were free. Somehow, miraculously, even with all the issues my own ignorance was causing, I managed to stay at #1 in Google search results (I tested in incognito mode to be sure), but I could've done this months ago. Facepalm

Epic visual tool

Epson 5030UB 2D/3D 1080p 3LCD Projector Submitted September 26, 2015 at 07:30PM by Bartisgod http://ift.tt/1QFpcEs