You may have noticed my site going down a lot recently (or not) this culminated in my host suspending me due to malware, don’t panic I’m pretty sure there wasn’t actually any malware on my site and the issue was caused by WordPress Bloat.
So what happened? Well my site was filling up 3GB which is odd as I only run WordPress here, I noticed that my MySQL database was 1.8GB, I don’t know much about website datsbases but I know it shouldn’t be that big, I did some research and found the culprit to be Jetpack’s feedback form, this is turned on by default and if you are like me you only check comments and ignore that feedback menu item in your WordPress dashboard. Apparently the spammers have figured this out too, I had over 20,000 spam messages when I checked, this had filled my MySQL database and was causing crashes too, I tried repairing the database and even manually deleting the spam from it, for a while it seemed hopeful but in the end I found it was just too corrupted and had to reinstall my site.
I’m back now and hopefully not experience any more trouble, I’ve deactivated the feedback form and blocked several IP addresses in Cpanel and I managed to export my posts so they should all be intact too, any bugs please let me know, also the site seems much snappier now which is a nice side effect.
Add a Comment Below