An Important Post for Fans and Readers of Bruce's Stuff on Brusimm

Hey gang, I thought I would touch base with you, via this and my Facebook post, on a change I will be attempting, a test, so to speak, on where I post what these days.  And I have to do it via this venue because I have a wicked troll pestering my site, Brusimm.com.

As some of you probably noticed, Brusimm went down last week because of technical issues with having a shared hosting service account with HostGator.  It's not HostGator's fault.  Up until this year, they've been fairly bullet-proof and reliable.  It's a combination of factors.

I don't have the money to pay for a dedicated server, and shared hosting has its limitations.  Last week, the tech department gave me three reasons over the course of the 24-hour period that they had shut me down, as to what the issue was.

So pick one: 

Too many posts in my WordPress installation.  (Never mind how other sites can have thousands of posts and not have issues.)

Too many plugins.  (Never mind how simple most reputable plugins are, or that I've cut back on plugins over the last few months.)

Google's over-zealous web bots that scour my site, and hence the server my site is on, sometimes apparently get out of control and impacts traffic to the other sites hosted on the server.  (Not that you see this as some sort of common issue with dedicated websites, but it is what it is.)

Now I don't equate the following to HostGator, but I have it on fairly decent authority that sometimes, questionable hosting companies will pull some fascinating stunts to force users to upgrade. 

This seems like one of them, but I also like swearing by this hosting company that was recommended by a trusted peer.  And being I've had near monthly show-stopping issues over the last few months, well, it got me to thinking how best to proceed.

(To WordPress.com users, this is a WordPress.org issue, for self-hosted sites.  If you're using .com, a completely different entity, this is not something you need to worry about.)

So to help alleviate my situation,

I can't reduce my plugins.  I've got what I've got for good reason.

With every new post, I've been deleting 2 to 5 older, non-relevant posts from the 2009, 2010 years.  This, in the hopes of reducing the footprint of my blog on HostGator's servers, and to start minimizing the traffic impacts that Google creates when they scour my site.

And yet, since I'm so damn chatty about things, oh what should I do?

I've decided to start using my other sites that are custom domains hosted with Google's Blogger tool. 

I have no post limitations, I can post to any Facebook page vie RSS Graffiti, and still get my stuff out to Twitter... sort of.  (I've to to work on refining that aspect.  Each site has its own Twitter account, but I'll be needing to get them all over on Brusimm's Twitter account by RT'ing manually.  For now.)  That should not be hard, using another tool at my disposal, TwitterFeed.

About that "Troll," I have a persistent commentor on Brusimm who won't go away. 

I've tried blocking his email's IP address, but it changes.  I've tried blocking his user name, but he changes that.  I've tried blocking his email address, but he's been changing that.  I started blocking his email ISP provider (It's a rare one), but he's changed ISP's and email providers. 

He's pretty persistent, or bored, or what have you.  So I did not want to post this on Brusimm, because if he caught wind of this there, I'd have a harder time beating his comments and tracking his efforts.

So, sorry about this end-around, but it's what I had to do, short of turning off comments on the site.

Later gang!

-Bruce