We maintain a forum at http://forum.webhostingbuzz.com to serve our customers, to facilitate to discussion and to use as an occasional announcement platform. Of late, it has been largely redundant due to our updated status platform and our increasingly popular Facebook, Twitter and Google+ channels. But the forum generally sits there, minding it’s own business and getting the odd post from some of our older customers and generally those that don’t talk to us on social media. I still check the forum on a daily basis, as do a number of my team.

vBulletin & spam

vBulletin, the forum platform we use, does horde a dark and dirty secret. It is a very attractive forum for spammers to target and attempt to use for link building techniques. It is important to note two things;

1. vBulletin has tried had to bring in anti-spam measures to make forums harder to spam. These generally seem less effective than WordPress, but many of the vBulletin spam is done by real people that can circumvent automatic checks
2. Google has long since banned these link building techniques and they’re more likely to get you a penalty than do you any good

Nontheless, on an almost daily basis, we have to remove spammy forum posts. Sometimes these are attempts at links, despite us having a minimum threshold before a link is activated. And other posts are weak attempts to boost post counts to a level where a member can actually post links. Most of these spam bots or spam humans stop posting before they reach this level, or we catch them in the act.

But one thing we don’t do is moderate forum registrations. We get a lot of people that register on our forum that never visit or post. I guess that it’s a PageRank 6 forum helps and makes it attractive for these link spammers.

Today, for the first time, we received a link removal request from a company that has previously spammed our forum.

Link removal request received from a forum spammer

We generally don’t hold grudges. The IP of the forum spammer, mentioned in that link, traces back to an ISP in Pakistan. So my assumption is the company requesting the link removal either hired this person, or hired an SEO agency that used this person in the hope of artificially inflating their rank. Many people, us included, have fallen foul of so called ‘SEO Agencies’ offering supposed white hat techniques. But this particular forum spammer registered just 1 year ago back in April 2012.  This was well into evolved Panda and Penguin territory so there’s really no excuse to be practicing such poor link building techniques.

I feel our offer is fair. It takes time to remove these spammy links but more importantly, we’ve spent a countless amount of time trying to keep our forum clean. Let’s see if they take us up on our generous offer. Updates will be posted here.

An interesting new blog platform is just around the corner. Funded through a  KickStarter project, Ghost aims to simplify the blogging and publishing world. While WordPress now aims to be a full web operating system and a powerful CMS, Ghost is solely aimed at bloggers. Projects like this that cross our hosting radar are always interesting.

Ghost Blogging Platform

In Ghost’s case, we’re particularly interested because:

• Around 55% ofthe sites we host are WordPress
• WordPress is great but it isn’t for everyone. There are security issues if the base install and plugins are not regularly updated. We do make this easy  through our 1-Click installer and updater (Softaculous) but it can still catch people out
• WordPress is simply too complicated for some of our audience
• The amount of options, plugins, themes and more that WordPress has can be overwhelming

Just to be clear that I have nothing against WordPress. I use it for some of my personal sites, we use it for our WebHostingBuzz.com blog (i.e. this one!) as well as for the WebHostingBuzz.co.uk Blog, and we host some of the most popular blogs in the world. A couple of these include NevilleHobson.com and LondonCalling.co - both highly ranked by Cision for readership and influence.

Ghost, however, promises to shake up the defacto blog platforms and should offer a viable WordPress alternative. Mr O’Nolan, Ghost’s founder, is well qualified. He’s:

• Built WordPress sites since 2005
• Worked as deputy head of the WordPress UI Group from 2009-11
• Helped design and develop the WordPress user interface
• Spoke at conferences all over the world about designing in WordPress

Ghost’s funding on KickStarter has also raised eyebrows. Ghost initially sought £25,000 which was quickly met, leading to Ghost going for a revised funding goal of £250,000. Given the tech press coverage Ghost has received from the likes of Wired, Forbes and TechCrunch, it seems highly likely that Ghost will meet this higher target. At the time of writing, £123,996 has been pledged towards the £250,000 total (50%) with 12 days still to run.

So what about Ghost and WebHostingBuzz? And Ghost web hosting?

We reached out to Ghost to express our partnership interest. It seems like we missed the window for the early-stage partner opportunities but we’ll closely monitoring developments, and Ghost has our contact details. Ghost talks about a cloud version of the product and how it will solve some of the ‘complications’ associated with self-hosted WordPress blogs. We assume (and hope) that Ghost does not discount a self-hosted version. We know as well as you do, most WordPress hosting complications are as a result of poor hosting service and not the principal of self-hosting. In fact, if Ghost bring a carefully moderated platform in which tested themes/plugins are approved and suggested to Ghost users, many of the problems that WordPress users face would be solved. I’m advocating a system as closed as Apple’s, but something better than the Android-esque approach used by WordPress would benefit users and web hosts alike. It’s very easy to develop a poor WordPress plugin then buy some positive reviews on Fiverr. People  then trust this plugin assuming these reviews are legitimate. And this is where security problems start.

When more details of a self-hosted version of Ghost surface, we will do plenty of groundwork to insure our hosting platform is fully compatible. We’ll quickly look to build a 1-click / auto-installer to make Ghost installation simple for our clients. And our team will conduct an intensive Ghost training course upon launch, guaranteeing we can support Ghost to the level we and you are used to.

Ghost is still a few months out. More information on their timeline can be found at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-blogging-platform#faq_58417

I’ll close by wishing John and Ghost the best of luck!

We’ve rounded another busy week here at WebHostingBuzz. And as you may know, there’s always something new in what we’re doing.

Today we’ve got great news for our customers as well as for everyone who in some way or other is a part of the WordPress Community. We’ve been always very welcoming and open to WordPress users, so drum-roll…

And meet wpXtreme – a breath of fresh air in your WordPress experience!

WebHostingBuzz has partnered with wpXtreme – a company that knows WordPress since it was born back in 2003.

 So what is it all about? Go ahead and check them out, but we’ll give you a sneak-peek anyway

It’s a free plugin providing access to WPX Store, from where you can install top quality plugins and themes for your WordPress website. Each and every plugin and theme in WPX Store goes through a multi-step validation process, ensuring quality and always up-to-date products.

Have I mentioned that WPX Store has free stuff in there? Well, now that you know – go give it a try, it’s super-easy (and free) to get started.

We’re going to share our own experience with wpXtreme soon, so stay tuned.

As you may already be aware, the brute force attack on one of the most popular CMS worldwide – WordPress, is still in progress, and has reached world-wide scale. The consequences of this attack are seen not only by our company but by basically any company that provides hosting for WordPress sites. As a rule, we are able to address or filter similar attacks without much trouble, but the current situation is different in scale and the level of resources invested into it.

At the moment, we have taken a large number of measures to mitigate the results of this attack, but the situation is worsened by several facts:

1) first of all,the attack is launched from spoofed IP addresses, and blocking these IPs doesn’t have any long-term effect;
2) the attack’s algorithm is extremely sophisticated, and is constantly evolving: all our attempts to reduce the consequences of the attacks which were functional an hour ago, are reduced in effect by each new evolution and change in the attack’s pattern;
3) the amount of compromised websites grows with each day (mainly websites with weak or default passwords and login credentials), malicious scripts are uploaded to these sites, and these scripts cause a highened network activity and system resource consumption, which influences the function and speed of all services of a hosting server.

We are constantly monitoring the current situation, and implementing the necessary countermeasures to pro actively deny the attackers the opportunity to compromise the WordPress installations located on our servers, but we’d like to ask you to peripherally assist us in mitigating this difficult situation.

What you can do:

No in-depth technical knowledge is necessary for this. Below, you can find a directive which will allow you to increase your WordPress websites’ security, and lower the summary load conditions on the hosting server, caused by the brute-force attack on WordPress installations, through a complete access filtering to your WordPress dashboard login interface for third-parties, and allow access to this interface for your IP address and the IPs of your users, only. This is a useful security measure not only during the current brute-force attack, but also at any given time, since it strongly increases the difficulty of compromising your WordPress site’s admin area. We’d like to point out that the directive listed below will limit access only to the dashboard login interface of a WordPress website, and not the website as a whole, or any other of it’s components.

All that must be done is to add the following rule to the beginning of the “.htaccess” file, which is located in the directory with your WordPress site:

<Files wp-login.php>
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
</Files>

“xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx” – this is your IP address, which you can find by simply visiting this website. Please indicate the IP you see there instead of xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.

We also strongly urge you to set a difficult-to-guess password for any admin users you may have, and update all components of your blog, including the WordPress engine itself, and all installed plugins, in a timely manner.

You can also find useful information on securing your WordPress website at the official WordPress site.

As always, we are here for you:

If you encounter any difficulties in implementing the measure suggested above, please simply contact our support team via our helpdesk, and we would be glad to assist you in making the necessary changes.

Dear Clients,

We must inform you that within the last 48 hours, worldwide malicious activity targeting WordPress CMS installations has spiked considerably.

WordPress is a widely popular blog CMS, which is used in a large percentage of Internet projects and presentations. Due to this, it takes considerably less effort for hackers to make use of WordPress engine vulnerabilities, insecure or outdated WordPress setups, compromised modules or similar means to compromise an existing WordPress installation. These types of attacks are common but we’ve noted a huge increase in such attacks over the past 2-3 day period.

In this case, a brute-force attack is taking place, in an attempt to pick WordPress admin area passwords, in the hopes of further usage of compromised accounts for malicious purpose. This issue is currently already known to many hosting providers, and is being discussed between our support teams. At the moment, several different solutions were implemented, including a number of firewall rules that are geared towards limiting the amount of possible login attempts from a single IP address to any wp-login file on a given server, with the subsequent block of the IPs that exhibit repeated malicious behavior in the server’s firewall rules.

This measure, developed by our team, has had a positive effect in halting the brute-force attack, but as a negative consequence, server load has increased, and customers are currently unable to access multiple WordPress Dashboards from a single IP address.

We urge all of our customers that are utilizing the WordPress CMS to upgrade to the latest stable release as soon as possible, change any WordPress admin area login credentials, and update any plugind and themes used, applying all available patches.

It is also recommended to reveiw the following security tips:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress

http://forum.webhostingbuzz.com/web-hosting-reseller-hosting-support/5522-security-issues.html

Should any questions or issues arise, please contact our technical department via our helpdesk https://www.whbsupport.com