New installation!

[anyoldcard]

I will disable the shoutbox but I do not say this to alarm others. I have a group of guys that i got into a pissing contest with and they are all on my old forum but never post.

I call them the hacker, porno, spammer guys. They bring down my smf forum, my zen carts and a few galleries on 40 different sites. They somehow change the sessions table in the sql and it throws an error. once in a while it is the "whos-online" table too. I do a "REPAIR TABLE" and the problem is fixed. Takes all of 5 minutes although one guy did change the settings.php somehow. I uploaded a new one and the site was back up.

I have ask Webmasters (parent host) to help but they have shown no effort at all so i moved everything to Hostgator and  VPS server. Hostgator has been great. These guys were stealing as much as 10gigs of bandwidth from 30 domains which adds up to alot of losses that i cannot afford.

I have had multiple Brute Force Attacks since moving to Hostgator so I am sure they have followed and are trying to get in so if the Shoutbox or chat program makes this easier for them, I will not activate it.

Mostly these guys are a PITA because they do not steal anything but they do bring down the different sites (mostly ecommerce) and cause loss in sales. I will soon be PCI compliant and I use 10 digit passwords now with letters, numbers and digits and I keep all programs upgraded.

The old forum was open to the public with some private threads, the new forum is all private with no open threads. I am installing a new firewalll which the old server would not let me do, plus Hostgator has their own firewall. I use host names here so people will know to stay away from some hosts that are not willing to help their clients and all they they must do is host and they do that poorly. I will go now and join your theme club.
later,
Ronald