For the past few days this site has been offline because of some pretty unfortunate (and stupid) events. I was having problems with the blogroll feature on my WordPress install, so I decided to write my own hack, inspired by Phil Ringnalda‘s PHP blo.gs blogroll. Stupid me, little did I know I was trying to do an fopen() on a non–existent file!
According to my hosting provider’s upstream provider (yeah, I know it sounds complicated), my little function() in WP‘s my-hacks.php took down the whole server. Of course I feel sorry about it, but I thought servers should have safeguards against this, and just let the script die upon reaching maximum execution time.
They decided to suspend my account indefinitely, and I was left with no access to my site and my emails as well. It occurred to me that perhaps they thought my-hacks.php was one of those script–kiddie hacks, and I was doing something illegal. Good thing for me, the guys at my host ploghost we’re very helpful, and moved my service to another one of their servers. Just a simple nameserver update and the site was up and running again, and now with the correct blogroll hack.
Plug: In case you’re looking for a good local webhosting service, ploghost should be more than enough for your needs. Give them a try!
Ouch. Mostly, I try to keep taking the work “hacks” back from crackers and script kiddies (despite the way I end up with things like an entry about hack-free CSS being a major resouce for people looking to crack IM clients), but having a filename built into WP that’s likely to convince hosts to shut people down on sight might be too much.