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We discovered we were getting less email inquires so we tested our contact us form, and discovered something was broken. This lead us into investigating the issue. We were routing our contact us form through GMail due to DKIM issues. Our domain and email server are not in the same place, so we run into this issue.

We switched from PHPMailer to SMTP and struggled a bit with the setting. That was partially due to our current hosting settings. We found the best settings were documented by Joomla. See the link below:

https://docs.joomla.org/How_do_I_use_Gmail_as_my_mail_server%3F

It is suggested to use a GMail App Passwode instead of your GMail Password. We found a good article on this setup, but didn’t capture the URLs. We found another article that was just as good.

Link to Article

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We often run Web Access Firewalls on our sites and we noticed a common threat is from Karthi The Hacker. On their website they claim to be an “Ethical” hacker. From our education the term “hack” is actually “attack”, and this is how we view these attempts. We found their IP address to be “89.39.105.112” and put them in our block list.

We don’t know the extent to which this “ethical hacker” is trying to penetrate our website, but we don’t care for it. Check your website firewall and see if the attacker is trying to penetrate your site. If you don’t run a Web Access Firewall contact us and we can help choose one and get it installed properly.

We contacted Karthi to see why we saw these results in our firewall. He is what the response was:

I haven’t tested your site yet. The images that you attached in this email appear to be the payload of my open source tool, which I published for penetration testing and bug bounty purposes. It’s possible that someone from somewhere in the world may have used this tool for their own testing.

Tool link : https://www.npmjs.com/package/redirecthunter 

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We made a few post recently and in Firefox and while logged in the posts showed up on the blog page; however, in Chrome and Edge the post wasn’t showing in other browsers. We checked on our phones and the post were not there. In the back-end of the site everything looked like it should.

We did a search and quickly found our answer here.

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/new-blog-posts-not-showing-up-4/

It was the “Caching” plugin we had installed. We are using “Fastest Cache” plugin. We cleared the cache and the posts were showing. We had made a post almost a month ago that wasn’t showing. We will need to review our caching settings to make sure our posts get out there.

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We took over a website that uses Umbraco a Windows based CMS. Finding hosting was tough, but we found HostGator which offered a lot for a little. Things were going fine for 90 days till the Let’s Encrypt SSL needed to be renewed. Before we knew it the site was getting privacy issues and the customer is worried. We had to call HostGator tech support, because there was nothing in the hosting that we could see that would cause the issue.

This took a couple of days to resolve, and it wasn’t something we would have known. HostGator’s tech support dug around and found that with Umbraco the needed to add a “path” to the “UmbracoReservedUrls” key. They needed to add the value “~/.well-known/”.

We didn’t like it took a week to get resolved, but we are still happy with HostGator’s web hosting.

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We finished a new WordPress site that has Yoast installed, and when we went to set the permalinks on the live site we couldn’t. We got a warning that changing the permalinks would have a serious impact. A serious good impact on SEO is what were look to get with the change. We should have made the changed before we transferred the site.

We looked around for a quick solution to put the site in maintenance mode, so we tried a couple of plugin. The site is hosted on SiteGround and they have great caching features which make the site fast, but can sometimes be frustrating when you are in development mode. The plugins were tried were not working quickly.

We did install the plugin “Maintenance”, so the next day we tried it again. This time we realized the works “Maintenance mode on” at the top in the DIVI toolbar. We tried to change the permalinks and this time it worked. So grateful to the get the page titles working.

We found a lot of ways to solve this on the following page.

https://www.wpexplorer.com/change-permalinks-wordpress/

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We have a customer that needs to move their website to a new hosting company. The site is a .NET Umbraco site with a MS SQL database which is not so common these days. The customer was looking for our advice and we found Hostgator offers Windows hosting with Plesk and MS SQL at a reasonable cost. We suggest HostGator and their developer agreed it is a good company.

Getting the hosting purchased and set up took no time at all; however, getting the access the MS SQL requires you to request credentials. It took overnight before we got the credentials. It was straight forward to export the existing database by right-clicking on the database >> Tasks >> Export data. Importing the data on the plesk side was straight forward.

Once the files were moved over and the database was installed we just needed to change the web.config file to new database connection string. We gave the customer’s IT team the nameserver addresses and IP address, and the site was on the new host. We find HostGator to have fast hosting, but the Umbraco site seemed slow. We ran Google’s page insights and they came back good. We also noticed Umbraco didn’t run well in Firefox, but fine in Chrome.

HostGator offers a free Let’s Encrypt SSL so we requested it get installed. HostGator said this was causing the site to not resolve to the home directory. They suggested we purchase the $39 SSL, but this too wasn’t working out. They suggested we purchase the full $69 SSL, so we did. They we got an email from HostGator saying the Free Let’s Encrypt SSL was installed.

Excited we went to the site and it was running terribly. We were constantly getting 503 service unavailable errors. HostGator tech support suggested switch to 32-bit app pool and using the database to handle the sessions. Once the app pool and session handling was changed the site was running great. No more 503 errors. HostGator refunded the full SSL.

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We received a FAX from BlueRocketSeo.net that was an invoice for SEO/Link Building services. The problem is we don’t use anyone to do our SEO, so this is a total scam. They want $99.58 for their “service”. They want you to mail your payments to:

620 Murphy Road
Suite #208
Stafford, TX 77477

If you get a FAX or letter like this totally disregard it. We are submitting this scam to the Better Business Bureau. We are just glad we didn’t also get a late fee.

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