brainwagon

I think I’ve had it.

I’ve been using bluehost to provide WordPress hosting of brainwagon.org for years, but I think that’s going to come to a close. This is being accelerated by the fact that it appears that I have a serious hacking problem: somebody has repeatedly sabotaged the blog, injecting new code via the wp-config.php to serve links to a cryptocurrency wallet software site, presumably for the purposes of SEO optimization. I did at least one round of sanitization, but they have managed to get in once again.

If you are a reader of my blog, you are aware that I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with WordPress: there are simply too many moving parts for me to track effectively, and too many possibilities for security flaws and bugs to seep their way in and cause me evenings of head scratching. Figuring this stuff out isn’t beyond me, but it is time consuming and a poor use of my time. Accessing bluehost’s customer support basically amounted to “yep, looks like you have a malware problem, hire someone (like our security team) to sort it out for you.” That seems like a poor use of my money. After all, brainwagon.org is just the online equivalent of the $1 notebook I blogged about earlier this week: it has no meaningful commercial value.

For the time being, brainwagon.org will remain as it is, I’m paid up through July. I will attempt to mitigate remove any security issues, but I do not trust it. I am disabling any user creation on the blog, and purging existing users. If you want to comment, you will still be able to do so, but of course the information you enter will be publicly available.

If someone has an idiots guide to creating a simple static site hosting solution, or is willing to answer an idiot’s questions, please feel free to reach out to me at mvandewettering@gmail.com. I’ll update the blog when I have a better plan in place.

Have a good one!