Blognoramus!
I’ve decided to coin a new term: *blognoramus*. A blognoramus is not, of course, an ignoramus with a weblog. There are plenty of those around and nobody has seen fit to coin a special term for them. It’s also nothing to do with a certain seaside town in southern England or a particular blog published there. No, a blognoramus is someone who has no knowledge of blogging or sensitivity to the general needs of bloggers and the occasional hazards we face. For it to have any relevance, the term must refer to someone who should know about these things – like, for instance, a web host. The original blognoramus is my original host, [Fasthosts](http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/) of Gloucester.
To be fair, I’ve been a Fasthosts customer for as long as I’ve used any paid web hosting (since March 2004) and it’s taken me this long to make such a complaint. They do have a number of advantages, like the SSH access they offer (not all hosts offer this, and my new host doesn’t). But there has always been a few problems. Their CGI scripts have a 10-second time-out, which often resulted in incomplete blogs when I used [Blosxom](http://www.blosxom.com/) (a CGI-based dynamic blog builder). This may have contributed to the continual “500 Internal Server Error” crashes which happened all the time when I used Movable Type the first time round.
Then there was the issue of Fasthosts not supporting common bloggers’ practices, such as that of using the “.htaccess” file to access dynamically-generated content through what looks like a file path. This is better associated with WordPress, which does not place archive files in a filesystem, but rather builds it every time someone requests it by fetching the entries from a database. (Movable Type has recently acquired this capability; if not used, it builds files, as Blogger and TypePad do.) The blog application can read the URL to find out what content to fetch. What the “.htaccess” file does is to specify what happens if a file is requested which isn’t there – like, say, instructions to a blog server disguised as directories and files. Many hosts support this; Fasthosts doesn’t.
What broke the proverbial camel’s back, however, was a flood attack on my MT trackback script which started on Friday night and carried on until, on Saturday morning, the host’s technical staff noticed that it was making their system crawl and, rather than just isolating the one script that was being targeted, moved a load of my files, including all my CGI scripts, to where I couldn’t seem to get to them. One of the staff emailed me just before 11am on Saturday telling me what had happened; I wrote back, telling him it was a spam attack and that he could, if he so wished, delete the file as it wasn’t essential to the running of the site. I did not get any reply, and by Sunday was already looking for another host.
Why? Because if they knew anything about blogging, and blogging is one of the most common activities of web host users nowadays, they would have realised exactly what was happening and isolated just the one script until the flood abated. I’m sure anyone who has been keeping up to date with developments in the Web community will have heard of weblog spam and the methods used in such spam. Or perhaps they would rather not host this sort of site because it holds up all their business customers. I found my new host in a list of [MT-friendly web hosts](http://www.learningmovabletype.com/archives/000391movable_type_friendly_web_hosts.php). Any reader seeking a web host for his or her blog is advised to choose their host carefully; on the other hand, there’s always TypePad. It was out of the question for me because it doesn’t support Markdown, but I’m sure they won’t shut your site down because of one spam attack.
