Some sites hosted on acs-webhosting.com may have discovered their front page missing off their blogsite.  Don’t worry - your blog hasn’t gone missing and you can still log in via the wp-admin page.  I’ve notified the web server support and they are investigating it and hopefully should be resolved soon.  My apologies for the inconvenience.

Addendum:  I’ve had a response and it appears that the apache is incorrectly serving the index.htm page for viewing rather than the index.php so I’m manually removing the .htm page off the affected sites while they investigate the cause.

If you have your blog hosted with acswebservices and recently had your site shifted to our new server you might find some odd characters showing up - it does depend on what version of Wordpress you are using.  The characters I mean show up like this: Week’s

This has something to do with a clash between the newer software on the server and that version of Wordpress.  But there is a fix.  You can download the wp-utf8-sanitize plugin which I’ve found to be very useful.  It’s worked about 95% of the time for these strange character sets that show up.  Just download the plugin, unzip the file, copy it to your plugins folder in your blog and then activate it in the plugins section in your Wordpress dashboard.

If you have your site or blog hosted on acswebservices.com then you’ll be pleased to know everything was shifted to a new server this weekend and all appears to be working fine. Please do let me know if you detect any problems after about 48 hours - just so we can give things a chance to settle in.

Those with the other server on acs-webhosting.com have no changes to be reported.

Thank you.

Periodically I get the above help message and there are some simple things you can do straight away.

1. Is your web space full?
You can login to the control panel to check that. You should see that you still have space available, or it will let you know if it’s full - usually there is a warning message generated but if your mail box has filled quickly, you might not get it.  If you find that your webspace is getting full quickly, you may need to upgrade your webhosting service to a bigger web space.

2. Is there email blocked in the mail server?
Perhaps someone sent you a huge file that can’t download. If that’s the case, view the offending email and print it off, if necessary, then delete it from your mailbox in your control panel. After that everything should start to download again. You may get repeated messages - that’s normal because the server kept trying to deliver repeatedly and would start all over again till it got to the spot where it was stuck.

3. Have you tried shutting down your computer and starting back up again?
It might just be a temporary problem and rebooting your computer may clear the error.

4. Is there anything else I should know?
Have you recently had something change on your computer, or even changed ISPs?  We may need to do some testing to see what else could be causing it.

Many of you will know that I use SpamArrest to handle my incoming email and process spam as well. I used to wake up in the morning and find 3-4 pages full of spam with the occasional unapproved email amongst it all. It is now less than a page that comes through overnight. What has made the difference?

I disabled the challenge message a month or so ago. Can’t remember why I did it - perhaps I read something somewhere or was thinking about it. At any rate I figured that spammers might not pursue my addresses (I have several listed at SpamArrest) if they didn’t get confirmation back that the address was live, i.e. the challenge message.

Whether or not, that’s the reason, only time will tell, but for now it seems to be working and I’m happy that I don’t have to wade through more than a dozen or so messages in the morning before getting on with my day.