As you may know, I spent a lot of time trying to resolve the problems created last weekend by a wonderful bleeping hacker at one of my niche sites. In a nutshell, this person exploited my Wordpress site by writing to my footer.php file through a vulnerability in my template. The call to wp_footer() is apparently a known issue that others have had problems with. It took all weekend and a few week days to finally get that problem straightened out. So I’d planned to get caught up on some design work this weekend. No such luck. And wouldn’t you know that Bluehost went down just as I was attempting to save some code I’d just typed into a template file.

In searching for the term “Bluehost is down” it looks like they had problems yesterday as well. I found several posts from people whose sites were down because of problems with Bluehost. I also found a couple of posts from some folks who believe the Bluehost servers are overloaded and therefore prone to performance problems. I’m not sure about that but I do know that none of my sites at Dreamhost have had any problems since I set them up a few weeks ago.

You know the saying “time is money?” Well, you internet marketers out there know that “uptime is money.” I wonder how many times do first-time visitors attempt to access a site before they give up? Two times? Three? Only once? Hmmn.

Right now I have domains at both Bluehost and Dreamhost. I plan to set up new sites with other hosting companies. So my question to you is:

Which Hosting Company Do You Use for Wordpress? How reliable is it? Would you recommend it to others?

What I found was that when I selected View, Source in IE 7 the bottom of the page was showing <strong>500-600 spam links</strong>.  Imagine hundreds upon hundreds of porn-related anchor text!  No wonder my site had been slapped by G.  The links weren’t visible to the naked eye but were definitely present in the HTML source code for EVERY PAGE ON MY SITE.

I submitted some inquiries at forums to no avail - no one could figure out how the links had been placed there.  I then ran a few Google searches and came upon a similar problem that someone had reported with their Movable Type blog.  Apparently their site had been spammed because of a plugin they’d activated that contained malicious code.  Hmmn.

A check of my plugins showed that one of them had a modification date of 3/22/09, the day BEFORE my site took a nose dive.   Since I haven’t added or modified any plugins in several weeks I quickly disabled and deleted it.  However, I still had to find out how to get rid of those spam links.

A check of the Wordpress files at my site showed that footer.php had been modified on 3/22/09.  Coincidence?  Hell no.  I haven’t modified the footer in months.

Sure enough, when I opened that file I found the source of the spammy links.  They were all listed at the bottom of footer.php.  Guys, you just don’t know how angry I was when I saw those porn links.  I’ve deleted them and I’m monitoring the site, but this really pisses me off.  My footer.php file was 6,000 times larger than normal.

Here’s the worst part of this story.  Because of this problem I decided to manually upgrade the site to Wordpress 2.7, which is supposed to be more secure than earlier versions.  I made a mistake and ended up OVERWRITING A DIFFERENT NICHE  SITE!  Yes, I overwrote the entire site because I highlighted the wrong domain in FileZilla.  I called BlueHost and the nice man from India told me that I was screwed (my words not his).  BlueHost doesn’t keep backups.  I have a backup SQL file but I’m clueless as to where to copy it.  And I’m gun shy now that I messed up the site.  I’ve submitted a ticket with BlueHost about this.

I went to the Google cache and was able to copy and paste several of my posts into Notepad but then Google decided that I was a spam robot and cut me off.

So, in a nutshell, TODAY HAS SUCKED.  I think I need to go to church . . .

Because I almost purchased Site Build It about two years ago I spent some time reflecting on what might have been. I can’t remember how I found out about Site Build It but what appealed to me at the time were a couple of videos about the product by current users. Let me explain several things:

a. I’d only had an online presence for a few months at the time;
b. I knew nothing about affiliate marketing;
c. I’d not yet found Griz, Vic, and Court.

In other words, I was a big time noob. So you probably wonder what made me decide against Site Build It. It’s simple. It didn’t “feel” right. Even though I didn’t know squat about SEO at the time (okay, I still have a lot to learn) I knew there was something a bit off about this product. Why? Because I couldn’t find any unbiased reviews of the product. I probably read through most of the posts on the first few pages in Google about the product. What stood out was that all of the reviews were positive. All of them. Even the posts whose titles appeared to criticize the product like “Site Build It - Is It a Scam?” and “10 Reasons Why I Hate Site Build It” turned out to be articles pimping the product.

Here’s something to ponder: do you order products from Amazon.com? If so, do you sometimes read the reviews before making your purchases? Yes? Okay, how many product reviews have you read at Amazon where EVERY reviewer gave the product 5 stars? I don’t mean products that only have 1 or 2 reviews, I’m talking about products with 40 or 50 reviews. I order lots of books from Amazon and always skim through the reviews before making a purchase. If I came upon a book with 40 or so reviews and all of the reviewers had given the book 5 stars I’d think:

a. the reviews were submitted by friends and family members of the author;
b. the reviews were submitted by the author him/herself;
c. all of the above.

In other words, I’d discount the validity of those reviews because they’re so slanted and I’d assume that the people submitting those reviews had a personal stake in making sure others purchased the book. It just wouldn’t “feel” right. That’s what turned me off about Site Build It.

And if someone left a “2 star” rating and the other reviewers left long diatribes about why the person was wrong to criticize the book it would only solidify my suspicion that the reviewers were in some way associated with that book.

This is what is I see happening with Site Build It and why I wrote this post. I can’t believe the hyena-like comments from SBI’ers who disagree with Lissie. You mean the woman can’t post her opinion about a product on her own site? And I then read comments by ex-SBI’ers who say that people are jumped on in the SBI forum if they even hint at criticizing the product. Sounds like people with a personal stake in making sure the product sells doesn’t it?

I now know how to set up sites using Wordpress, Blogger, HubPages and Squidoo - I don’t need to shell out $300 each year for a website building product, regardless of how much it might automate the process.

My advice to people who are considering purchasing SBI is to start with a free Blogger account and then start reading through Griz’s posts at his How to Make Money Online site. He’ll teach you about creating keyword optimized posts, getting backlinks, and increasing your traffic. And if you leave a comment at his site espousing the supremacy of WordPress over the free Blogger product neither he nor his readers will attack you.