Comments and Trackbacks Disabled Again

I got home from Queensland late on Saturday night, and Sunday sat down to write all about my holiday, and my site had been suspended. Great!! I thought it was a bandwidth problem because it was nearing the end of the month and I'd received one of those warnings about reaching 80% of the bandwidth limit. I wrote off an email to the hosting providers, saying that 2 days would surely not use another 20% and why was I locked out???

Here's there response:

Not impressed!!! So then I emailed them back, asking to access the ftp to download my site and perhaps move (yet again) to another server, and asked for my 10 months of hosting left to be refunded since their service couldn't cope with my needs.

Here's that response:

So I had to accept that, and disable comments and trackbacks on all my sites, and I've reinstated the contact form with a more secure script that uses a captcha image. I had a couple of error messages from the script yesterday, and none since, so the security is keeping the spammers out. Isn't it lucky I'm still on holidays from work so I can sort this mess out?

This isn't my ideal situation at all, and I'm disappointed that the Akismet and Autoban combination didn't solve my server overload problems. Each day I added more sites to the list of banned IP addresses, but as fast as I added them they changed, and I've found the whole situation just too hard to deal with.

My old server is still sitting unused, and I tried to move everything back there (though I know the problems would have persisted!), but they didn't have the captcha image on the contact page, no GD with their PHP install, and ImageMagik doesn't work on that server either. It's this cheap web hosting! You get what you pay for, and that seems to be nothing! (except unlimited disk space, plus that and unmetered bandwidth on the more dodgy server!)