I’m sure you already know that spam is not your friend… but in the blogging world it can apparently shut down your blog too.
On Saturday I woke to discover neither of my sites, Domestically Speaking or Power of Paint, were there. I discovered an email from my server host that my sites had been suspended… WHAT!
Of course 2 out of my 3 kiddos had games that morning… so my first priority was getting the family fed and to the field on time.
In the afternoon I was able to chat with my host server and within about 20 minutes the problem was solved. The darn culprit was spam!!! I use a plug-in to filter my spam, and it catches most of it. The spam that had shut down my blogs had never even been published, but was still sitting there in my spam folder.
With over 2,000 spam comments it was affecting the servers and the speed which triggered something on the servers end.
So what did I learn?
I asked the nice lady at Blue Host (my server host) what she would recommend to help prevent this from happening again. Her recommendation… delete those spam comments every week or 2. Something so simple, but something I just hadn’t done for a while. I figured as long as they weren’t published I was good… boy was I wrong.
Another thing I highly recommend doing is backing up your blog. If you are with wordpress there are lots of great plug-ins that you can use where you can schedule your back-ups hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. In blogger you can download your blog. I would recommend that too, since your blog is sitting on their server and if blogger decides to shut you down you won’t have your goodies.
One finally blogging safety recommendation is to back-up your photos and anything else blogging related. I have an external hard-drive to back-up my goodies… but there are plenty of online back-up services available too.
We, who have blogs, know the time, energy and love we put into these things. It’s easy to forget these important things until something goes wrong… but hopefully these reminders will help prevent something going wrong for you.
Any other blog safety tips you guys want to add/share?? Leave a comment…
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