Changed hosts

It's a bit of a bad thing when you wake up in the morning and find that a rather important email bounced.

Every morning when I'm snuggled deep in my warm bed, an automated process launches itself, backs up all of my databases, and emails the resulting file to my gmail account. Gmail is a good thing. As soon as the email arrives at Gmail, I have a rule that deletes the email immediately. I can hear you now. You're saying "What the?? Then why even BOTHER sending the email in the first place?!?" Well, there's a reason behind this seeming insanity. Gmail keeps deleted emails for 30 days. So what I end up with is a 30-day rolling backup in my Gmail trash bin.

I created this little system back when I had a problem with my web host. Someone hacked their server and put an IRC bot on my account, so they banned me without warning. Normally, I would just switch providers, but unfortunately, I didn't have a recent backup. Once I explained to the web host what I thought had happened, they were (fortunately) very nice and reinstated my account. That's when I decided to DO something about the lack of backups and the above-explained backup system.

Long tangent. Sorry. But it's the backup system that alerted me to a new problem with the web host. My email with the backed-up database files is the important email that bounced. Here's the message that was reported:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

@gmail.com
SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [72.14.205.27]:
550-5.7.1 Our system has detected an unusual amount of unsolicited
550-5.7.1 mail originating from your IP address. To protect our
550-5.7.1 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been
550-5.7.1 rejected. Please visit
550-5.7.1 http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html to review
550 5.7.1 our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. e13si3902388qba

In other words, Google is blocking email originating from my IP address due to SPAM originating from my IP address. GREAT.

The web host I'm in the process of dumping has been pretty good. The problem is that I'm only paying for shared hosting. This means that there are probably umpteen gazillion web sites on the same server as my web site. All umpteen gazillion of them share the same IP address. This means, in effect, that someone else on this shared server probably WAS sending SPAM, and that caused the IP address to be put on the Google blacklist. I'm probably not the only unhappy camper in this situation.

I think I've found a cure to that problem, and for only $3 more per month than I was paying. I'm moving to something called a "Virtual Private Server," or VPS. A VPS still puts a lot of sites on one server, but from both inside and outside the server, it looks like it's its own separate machine. They use Virtualization Technology to make it appear as if my site is the only site on the physical machine. I will also be the only one using the IP address assigned to my account, so if there's SPAM, I know that I've been hacked or someone is spoofing, not that some other JERK using the same IP address is actually spamming. At that point, I can use my knowledge of network security to fix the problem.

So... If you're reading this article, the DNS has resolved and everything has switched over. There will be glitches here and there, but I'm sure to be happier in my new corner of the Internet.