I finally got smart and gave up on Lunarpages hosting service. Even with all they said they did, their security was SEVERELY lacking. All but maybe on or two secondary sites have been moved to InMotion Hosting. Much more expensive, but so far it’s been worth it. Unfortunately I will have to pass this cost along to clients when their renewal period rolls around. No new clients as of late. I really don’t want any right now. The current ones are keeping me fairly busy and I have a full schedule outside of C&H and Upstairs Room.

I did some extra KASA “commercials” for them this year for their upcoming Leadership Development Institute they have each year including the usual Fred Awards videos for 2016. I moved all of the past Fred nominee videos to Youtube during the Lunarpages trouble.

Lots of other things happening including renovating the old Transform Us bus into new (permanent) living quarters. Lots of trade skills needed there. Design, Carpentry, Electrical, Plumbing, Etc… and even Welding. I am trying to learn enough welding to get the needed work done myself. Time will tell. Overall, the project is coming along well despite some distractions and hopefully will be done and moved into by this fall sometime. When all is done, I will share some photos of the process along the way.

I’ve had some distractions, but distractions like this out the back window are nice though…

Wow, I can’t believe how stupid some people are. Why do you want to break into MY website?

Apparently hacking into WordPress based websites is the latest thing. Over the last several months, WordPress websites around the world have been targeted by these thieves. I recently dealt with this on approximately 25 websites. They got it and planted THOUSANDS of their own files within my file structure pointing to their own eCommerce websites. Using MY hosting, MY bandwidth all for their own. Thieves. Much of the problem with my hosting provider occurred simply because of the amount of ATTEMPTS. It was easy to stop the intrusions into the websites, not so easy to stop them from ATTEMPTING. The attempts themselves is what can overload a server CPU.

As I said, I’m not the only one. This has occurred around the globe, so there was plenty of help to be found thanks to Google, FB and forums, since WordPress is used to create 58.6% of all Content Management System websites (blogs and user manageable websites). That also means that WordPress is used to manage 24.9% of ALL websites. ALL websites.

My host provider was not of much help… at first. They kept telling me my CPU usage of their server was too great and at least twice my account was suspended and ALL of my websites were down. This was unacceptable as some clients rely greatly on their websites for business purposes. They kept telling me that for $34.95 PER MONTH, they could have someone assist me in cleaning up the websites and applying security. No thanks, I can do this myself.

I won’t go into details, but after MANY late hours I finally got .htaccess files applied correctly and a great security plugin configured for all websites.

After going through the sites and adding security in MANY different ways, the hosting provider finally helped out by adding a CAPTCHA to my directories. I was grateful for that because I did not have access to do that myself on that level. But too late. Even though I just renewed my hosting with them in July for the next three years, I found a new host that cares a bit more and does lots of the background security without me having to deal with it. A bit more expensive, but far less than the monthly fee plus the additional $34.95 the old host wanted to do less.

Lots of headaches over. Still finalizing getting all the websites moved over, but each has been successful so far.

Along with this move, I have implemented upstairsroom.COM as my main website, while keeping upstairsroom.NET as an alias instead of the other way around. This helps to keep any established search engine entries working.

Fred award videos will be starting soon for KASA with a June 15 deadline.

Elaine has returned to Gerber Scout Reservation for a second year as Aquatics Director. I will be joining her for about 3-4 weeks in June-July after the KASA videos are completed.

Finally temporarily living in our dream home (on wheels) sorta. It’s a travel trailer, but we are not mobile as we would like to be as it is a fifth wheel camper and we only have 4 wheels… baby steps…

There is currently no physical “upstairs room”. It’s more of a “workspace”… It’s not upstairs and it’s not a room, but that’s OK.
A major overhaul of C&H website leads me into the realm of Genesis for WordPress and HTML5. Including parallax programming. Very cool. The new www.chavs.net launches this week.

Lots of minor work/maintenance on the ol’ van is about done. It will be ready for the summer road trip whether it likes it or not. New front struts, wheel bearing/hubs, bushings, tie rods, ball joints, rotors, radiator. Rear air shocks, repaired auto-ride-level control, brakes. Maybe even some new-ish rubber all around before then.