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Alternatives to Domestic Violence

Ever so often I am tasked with building, maintaining or upgrading websites for non-profits. These organizations are of course limited in their funding and so the task is often done in increments over several months. In this case the website http://alternativestodv.org/, a women's health organization and shelter located in Riverside California had a website that really needed some work. It is a Wordpress website that had fallen into disrepair.

Alleviating Some of the Crap Thats Slowing Down Your Server at the Source

Several months ago I started receiving the occasional alert email in the middle of the night warning that my server was hitting a threshold. Reviewing the server logs I found the usual suspects. Hits to Wordpress; admin-ajax, wp-login.php, xmlrpc.php... But also, there were a ton of hits from a web crawler that was hitting the same content over and over and over. There are plugins available to cache websites and throttle repeat content, but a hit to the CMS is still a hit and will require PHP, several image requests, file requests and more than a few hits to the database.