Reliable hosting is a cornerstone of successful internet marketing, and from past experience Bluehost was always on the most reputable list.

In a complete “screw you” to their customers, Bluehost has elected to shut down their servers this evening without informing their customers. Great move! Apparently, they’re as good at customer services as they are at embracing twitter (which they started doing in Feb. and haven’t done any embracing since).

Seems as though many customers may turn away, based on what folks are saying on twitter.

I wonder how much pay per click money was wasted with this fiasco… sounds like an infographic to me.

I’m not trying to make light of anyone who got caught in the scam, but it seems that Twitter caught the wave of some “phishy” business over the weekend.

A lot of people were affected, including Fox News, Britney Spears and CNN’s Rick Sanchez.

If you got a random direct message from someone and clicked a link that redirected you to twitter.access-logins.com/login/, DO NOT FILL OUT YOUR INFORMATION.

I haven’t been personally affected by phishing on the social sites, but my wife has received some strange Facebook messages from friends on her wall with alleged “pics” of her on sites like “barkjump.com” and “fittry.com.”

If you didn’t know, this is also a phishing scam, just on Facebook.

AriWriter has a list of the all the different .com’s that are part of Facebook phishing. The culprit behind these recent phishing scams is access-logins.com, which is based in China.

Sometimes you go about things in the wrong way. I may have done just that when I decided to do the first (of many to come) SEO experiment on our blog.

If you haven’t yet read the SEO Flattery Experiment post, it’s available here. To summarize, I wanted to test the idea that you could build links by flattering people who you wanted to get links from. I have an interest in photography, subscribe to about 30 photography blogs, and have a photography blog myself… so I thought… Hey… I’ll create a list of my personal favorite photography blogs and then rate them based on some different things and see what happens.

So, I spent about 6 hours analyzing these blogs to determine which ones were the “best of the best” based on 3 pieces of criteria.

There was very little response at first, until I sent emails out to the blog owners. All but two of them responded almost immediately with a courteous “thank you”. One of them linked… which was great! In a conversation I was having with Aaron Wall about SEO and link building, he mentioned that his opinion is that if you can get 10% – 20% of the people, you should consider yourself successful.

I started to see some decent traffic as a result of the post within a day or so. Then, one of the bloggers posted it to a forum and traffic really took off.

They got pissed.

And then I started getting emails. I mentioned in my post on this site, the name of the designer who created 3 of those blogs that were posted. I did this giving them “props” because I really like their work. Well, someone got into a conversation or sent emails or something telling all of the photography blog owners that the post was part of an SEO experiment.

One emailed me saying that he was going to post about it, but now that he knows I was blowing smoke up his ass that he wasn’t going to now.

Another spoke of me as unethical and how dare I do such a horrible thing.

The other, someone who I have actually hired in the past made a comment that they “don’t know how they feel about it”.

Here’s the deal in the end. That post on the ConklinImages blog gets more traffic than any other post now. And in addition, the post is coming up when people search for things like “greatest photography blogs” and other’s that you can see on the original post.

I ask you this my pissed off photography bloggers (whom I still admire)…

Is it a bad thing when someone googles “10 greatest photographers” that your photography site comes up as one of them on my site? I don’t think so.

Getting Hacked

I have never worried about security on my photography blog site in the past because it was just a hobby thing and only had like 50 unique visitors a day… it was really just a personal thing.

So, when I set the thing up forever ago, I 777′d my main blog directory so that wordpress could access my htaccess file. I know!!! Half of you are SCREAMING at me right now. For those of you who don’t understand, this leaves your site WIDE OPEN to hacks.

I had posted screen shots of each of the photography blogs that I rated. I looked at my site the other day and all of the screenshots posted that were of blogs designed by infinet design were completely changed to other images.

Now, they have since been changed back and I have locked up my site a bit better. I don’t know who did it, but I have my assumptions and I say “props to you” for having so much time on your hands.

When I was investigating my log files to see when things were changed… sure enough, my htaccess file was changed on a day that I did not touch it.

Now, I believe that the most comical part of the “hacking” part of this story is the post I wrote a few months ago about securing your site.

peace.

Oh… congrats to Aaron Wall… your comment from the original post was correct.

At ProspectMX, a lot of our core technologies are founded with a wordpress “skeleton”. I was looking through my google reader today and I came accross a very helpful article from Matt Cutts titled, “Three Tips To Secure Your WordPress Installation”. In the article, Matt talks about the importance of:

• Securing your wp-admin directory
• Hiding (Securing) the list of plugins that you run
• Staying up to date with patches and security updates

I would consider this a must read if you’re currently building sites and/or blogs with WordPress. Alex, our technology director, actually had a site that he manges hacked a while back… so it does really happen.