Phew! What a day, what a day… I woke up at 5:30 this morning to discover the site was down.  Alison sent me an email notifying me of the outage and my server monitoring script notified me as well.  When I saw it was a formatting error in the code, I knew it was going to be a LONG day.  I had been hacked. 

Fortunately it wasn’t all that malicious.  Having been hacked a couple years before I have always been vigilant about keeping my software up to date, but had always known that hosting on a shared server particularly with WordPress was asking for trouble.  Trouble knocked at my door late last night.  I’m a firm believer that everything happens for a reason, and this was a firm slap in the face to get green stocks moved to a private server.. NOW.  It’s something I have been wanting to do for several months.  As the traffic increased and new functionality was rolled out (such as the new real time twitter feeds), I knew the days of shared hosting were over.  I will tell you that based on lots of experience across different hosts that if you are hosting a popular script such as WordPress on a shared server, you’re asking for trouble no matter how secure you think you are. 

So, I’m happy to say that green stocks is now on a much faster, more secure server.  If you see anything funny going on with the site please do me a huge favor and let me know.  I’m still working on the twitter feed and the data on the home page as well as the RSS feeds in the tracking pages but everything else should be ok and running much faster. 

I’ll be back to full time posting sometime tomorrow. 

Tate Dwinnell, Founder GSC