Changes and Drastic Improvements
December 6, 2011 Category: Uncategorized 4 Comments 
As you all may have known, over the past few years Vraul has been hosted by Bluehost. Bluehost is a very affordable hosting provider and can beat the prices on nearly every web host out there but has a lot of restrictions that turn out to be “not worth it”. For instance, if you exceed 10,000 database tables on your account, they will and without warning shut your site off. They did this once to us (vraul) because as blogs are created some 30-50 tables are created for them. Coupled with spam (biggest culprit) and legitimate users, at one time we had some 20,000 tables (and Bluehost was not happy one bit).
So ever since about 3 months of hosting with Bluehost, our moderation team has had a constant struggle to fight spam on this system so today we did the unthinkable, we moved everything to a dedicated server and put Vraul up on the CLOUD! This means quite a few things that everyone should know:
- Vraul will be 20 times faster
- Spammers will be blocked by our cloud firewalls
- Your data is double secure (because it is hosted from thousands of locations!)
To give everyone a scale that is measurable to what we did, let me explain how everything transpired. We moved the site over first of all, with all new content (moving the database as spam filled as it was, just didn’t seem right, but legitimate user’s accounts were preserved — just login!). Once the DNS changed over we were immediately hit with THOUSANDS of spam registrations (this is an understatement, the MySQL table had some 3,000 pages with 100 records each page. This was just after 5 hours of setting the site up! Then I installed the reCAPTCHA and deleted all the spam accounts and blogs. After another 4-5 hours we had about 270 spam accounts..
Then, I put it on the cloud, locked down the main site (forcing everyone through cloud firewalls), and deleted all of the spam submissions… And after 24 hours, not a single, solitary spam signup and I have verified by creating test accounts that account creation is still very possible!
If this works like I’m thinking, we should be able to start monetizing Vraul and providing services on a much broader scale. But for now, enjoy the new speed increases and data security 
Secured by
Actually we were shut down at least 3 times as I remember it.
The spamers we are seeing now are not that of the bot nature.. They are real humans, possibly working for a sweat shop in China that comes here to create an account and enters that info into a database to spam their blog with.
What I may start doing is putting a CAPTCHA on the login boxes, that way they won’t be able to login once they hand off the username and password.
I’m still a bit apprehensive about doing this because it makes the entire experience more tedious for everyone else, but it is an option.
Another option…. Right now people can signup and login with Facebook. If we go 100% Facebook auth, then someone will have to have a Facebook account to login (generally not the sort of thing spammers do when targeting a specific site). The downside is just that, some people don’t have a Facebook account and do not want one either.
This good and did we shut down three times? because i only remember twice
Yeah one of those times, Jeremy caught it about as soon as it happened… I had to clear away the tables and they immediately re-opened it.