A few months ago my web host was hacked and the villains that broke in began using it to send spam email. I didn’t even notice until I began getting auto-replies from people I’ve never emailed quoting the spam messages my server was sending.
Now trying to track down a break in and find any backdoors installed on your server is a painful experience when running just one site. This server was running over 50 sites.
I’m trying to cut my life to the bare minimum in all areas and saying no to everything that isn’t exactly what I want to do. Soon after this hack took place I realized I haden’t cleaned up my online life. Back when I was doing Internet Marketing full time I purchased hundreds of domains with full intentions of turning them into niche sites each making a few dollars a day so I could achieve completely passive income (the dream.. right?). Unfortunately as what happens to most people that travel down this route it didn’t go quite as planned and 3 years later I’m left with hundreds of domains not pulling in much traffic and costing a boatload of money to maintain.
There’s little use in keeping these old sites around when they’re simply being money sinks and the rest of my life has moved onto bigger and better things. Even though I haven’t looked at them in years they still give mental and financial baggage when I’m doing tasks such as backing up my sites, switching hosts or navigating cpanel.
So I’ve gone ahead and deleted them all. I’m down to about 30 domains most if not all related to ZenTester and Tower Storm. If I don’t begin working or selling these remaining domains in the next 6 months I’ll be unregistering them too.
After this great purge I discovered there’s only one domain on this web host that I wanted to keep running, this very blog you’re reading now.
Being that I’m moving web hosts anyway I thought why not upgrade my blog to advance with my programming career. I made the switch from PHP to NodeJS coding over 2 years ago now so if I want a blog I can hack on without wanting to tear my hair out (ok WordPress isn’t that bad, but I am sick of PHP) I might as well use Ghost.
So here I am, typing in Ghost. It’s kind of nice, in an elegant zen kind of way. It doesn’t have the features of WordPress, but it doesn’t have the bloat either, and so far it’s going ok.
Update 26/02/2017 – I’m back on WordPress