Today I got the phone call I always hate to get from clients. It was Stephanie O’Dea telling me her site was down. Whenever someone reports a site outage or hacking I drop everything and get on it immediately. In this case her web site had been replaced with a message saying her account had been suspended.

I immediately got in touch with the support team for her hosting company. These are the times when learn if you made a wise hosting decision, because no one wants to be left hanging when their site is down. I got in touch with a representative right away as I always have with Quality Host Online, which is why they’re one of my preferred hosting companies. It turns out they’d shut down the account because a script had sent a flurry of emails all at once. They assumed someone had hacked the account and was sending out spam.

I had a clue they didn’t though. Stephanie was particularly stressed because she’d just tweeted a link to a giveaway she was hosting on the site. You entered by posting a comment. WordPress automatically sends Stephanie an email notification when someone comments. Stephanie has a large Internet following, so hundreds of people were commenting at once, causing the blogging software to send 400+ emails in a matter of minutes. The hosting company assumed this was spam and shut down the site.

I explained what was going on and got Quality Host Online to turn the site back on, after which I immediately logged into WordPress and turned off the email notifications under Settings -> Discussion. Problem solved, all within 45 minutes.

The site crash was both good and bad. Bad because the site went down, obviously. But it was good to know that the hosting company monitors security issues like this and will be sure to shut down the site quickly if it ever does get hacked. You want to be alerted to a security breech as soon as it happens so you can minimize the damage. I’m glad to know Quality Host Online is on top of that. Now I also know to tell a client to turn of email notifications if they expect a flurry of comments to be submitted all at once.

A client contacted me two weeks after we’d transferred her site to a new hosting company to tell me she was having problems receiving her email. After a lot of digging, half a dozen test emails sent into a void, and one very helpful and prompt customer service representative, we discovered the MX settings from her old account had been transferred to the new account.

MX is short for “mail exchange” records, which are a bit of technical voodoo that you probably don’t need to know about unless you’re a system administrator. You can read the Wikipedia entry on MX records for more info. In this case, the MX configuration was pointed toward the old host’s mail servers, which is why messages weren’t coming into the new host.

The MX records were transferred to my client’s new account because we used cPanel, a popular site management program, to do a full site move. Normally when I transfer a client’s site to new hosting, I manually pick and choose what to move over, zipping files and uploading and downloading things via FTP. In this case, the client’s site was so huge and had so many email accounts that we transferred the site via cPanel. When you move a site from cPanel to cPanel, tricky settings like MX records get ported over.

So, if you ever do a cPanel to cPanel move, double check you MX settings! You can do so by going to MX Toolbox and entering the domain name you want to check. The good news in this case was that all the missing emails were available on the old hosting account, so no message were lost, though they were delayed.