This  is just a bit of an update as I have noted there has been some issues with the speed at which the site is running occasionally and thought it would be of interest to just post about the kind of things that chew up often days of my time to just keep things functioning. 

I am not a web developer, or a programmer, or a professional musician. I am more a hybrid of many skills which gives me quite an extensive toolset and solving problems of all kinds is something I love to do. However this also means that I feel I can take on any job and sometimes this lands me in a lot of frustration as there are limitations to my knowledge and patience at times. 

I have been managing my own websites for over 20 years now on both Joomla and WordPress CMS systems and have undertaken studies in CSS, PHP, SQL, Javascript so I actually do know quite a lot but am far from an expert.

I really enjoy the challenges of making a site work and solving initial issues but mostly I take on so many roles so I can learn more, but also due to financial reasons, the cost of a professional to do the work is often far too high for me to afford. I figure if it takes me 5x longer to solve a problem but I also learn some skills from it, it’s worth the effort. 

Well over the last few weeks I have been having a frustrating time with the site seeming to just not respond when doing work, loading pages for sometimes minutes at a time and just not running smooth at all. I run this site with all the plugins set to not update automatically and I have administered sites in the past where auto updates break things however I keep the main core updates enabled as website updates are important, I just do controlled updates at certain times for all plugins. 

Recently the WordPress core was updated and it seemed I started to have issues after this point so I decided it was also time to update plugins and also my PHP version which was running on an older depreciated version of PHP in hopes this would solve these latest performance issues. After half a day of updating and fixing issues after the updates it was still no better and this is where days of investigations started. 

To cut a long story short, after reviewing a heap of logs and finding nothing I received notice from a user that they were no longer able to download any of the free demo download libraries, they were downloading the zip file but the zip was opening corrupt and would not extract. This seemed to be an issue with the way the file was delivered for some strange reason and setting the download manager plugin to a different method fixed the problem but I also reviewed the logs for this plugin and found the downloads were being attacked by a Hong Kong based spambot in huge waves, thousands of attempts constantly since these are unprotected free downloads this was causing large amounts of file requests daily and is likely part of the reason for the slow website performance. 

The solution to this was I had to implement Captcha, just the simple click box which after 24 hours has completely halted these attacks and (touch wood) seems to have fixed the performance issues but it is a measure I didn’t want to have to take as I like to keep things as easy to access for visually impaired users. 

WordPress websites I can tell you are high targets over Joomla based websites. I rarely had an issue in over 10 years running this site on Joomla, received only a few spam posts and registrations a week in all that time. When I launched this site I initially had registrations freely open and even with captcha there was a loophole somewhere and I would get spam registrations almost every 60 seconds constantly to the point I had to disable account registrations and only allow registration upon creating an order which is fine as there is no need for accounts unless you want to purchase something but it just highlights how much work there is in not just developing a website but making it secure and operational and how many hours are spent on things like this that most people just never know about.