It’s been a busy couple of days for me. Another one of my websites started misbehaving. The problem turned out to be that the site had been compromised by some bad actor, presumably for nefarious purposes. While I was working on that problem, my younger sister told me that this site was down. Now I had two sites down at once. Yikes.
My internet service provider quickly brought this site back up. He described the problem:
“…When a group of processes, in this case the PHP Interpreter php-fpm, experiences high memory pressure, it kills the entire group. The cause of the pressure is too many criminals attacking too many sites simultaneously. They’re stupid, running scripts which very rapidly request php pages with vulnerabilities, hoping to find one. When too many of them are doing this at the same time, we get this problem…. It’s irritating to me that literally more resources have to be devoted to fending off criminals than providing the actual service….”
As for my other website, I’m converting it from a dynamic site run on WordPress to static HTML. It’s kind of funny. I started out building websites by writing HTML in a text editor. That was too time-consuming, so I switched to using WordPress as a CMS. And now for this one small website, I’m switching back writing HTML in a text editor because it takes less time than dealing with all the security needed to keep WordPress from being compromised.