Jul
27
Recovering from site woes
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I can’t imagine anything more aggravating than after sites being down, then getting 403 - Permission denied on your own sites and then, after contacting the hosting company’s support, getting a response a day later saying they can access them just fine, saying I should contact my ISP. That’s all of Southern Calif. AT&T blocked - on their end, NOT the ISP. There was no way to get through to that first line support person that it was on their end. After I literally screamed to the sales folks by email they had it escalated and it turned out it was because of having installed Apache mod_security module, apparently messing up in the process.
So it appears a number of IP ranges had been blocked at server level - who knows which ones at ths point. Mine was fixed, but which other IP ranges are still blocked who can tell. Several sites were affected, among them Charming Woman being totally dumped by Google except for the homepage and 1 other page, supplemental. I moved it to another host (a real cheapie I’d used for another site) and was swamped with 302’s for no reason and never heard back from support at all, so I again moved it, this time to new hosting I’ve taken that I’m quite pleased with.
I tried doing a deep link to one other interior page on the women’s site, so that’s now indexed, making 3 pages. I have used the submission form now that the site’s been moved onto my new hosting, which I’m very pleased with so far. But I may have to try to do external links into the site to see if that will work to get the whole site indexed again, since doing that seems to have worked with the one page. Let’s see if womens apparel and plus size clothing will now get picked up again. 
The other site affected, which was on the same reseller account that went down and was then 403 access denied, was Baby Gifts 2 Go which after a nice run for a while is now completely dumped from MSN Search. The site isn’t in the MSN index at all any more. I have to add that in addition to the hosting woes I did change the site’s file structure some, using 301’s and as much as I love MSN Search I’m not sure how seamlessly they or Yahoo Search handle multiple 301 directs on sites.
The sites are very nicely and easily moved over to the host I’ve just started using, and what’s impressed me most, aside from the ease of setting up new accounts on multi-domain hosting, is the quality of the support people. I’ve had very quck responses on questions I’ve had, the support folks seem to know what they’re doing and are diligent to get back with the answers I’m looking for in no time flat.
So I’ve now moved a number of sites over to Fastnext Multiple Domain Hosting and went for the longer term deals, not only because he pricing is better doing it that way, but it’s nice to just have sites hosted and enjoy the peace of not having to even give it a second thought again for long time to come.
So the hosting issues are now solved, fingers crossed that the indexing for those two sites will be totally restored. They’re both high-maintenance affiliate sites rather than low-maintenance, but that’s another topic that deserves some further attention
Jul
25
Online CSS Generator
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This looks like a real find. You just fill in the checkboxes for page design preferences and it will generate the complete CSS for the page. Perfect for a novice at CSS positioning: