By now you’ve heard and read plenty about the Heartbleed Bug that struck two weeks ago. Unfortunately, DJ D-Mac & Associates were affected.

The WordPress platform and all the plugins at this site have been carefully kept up-to-date, but djdmac.com resides on a shared server. Those other sites were not as diligently maintained, using outdated plugins, etc., leading to security holes that the virus took advantage of.

The virus co-opted the server to send spam messages which then choked legitimate email, causing extended delays (last count was 51 hours), or worse, not delivering email at all. This has been frustrating at best, overwhelming at worst.

In using bandwidth to deliver spam, the server attack also slowed this site to a crawl, with wait times approaching 10 seconds for a page load.

With the help of a few tech-savvy colleagues, we’ve been able to isolate and address these issues. As of the time of this post, we’re currently migrating the site to a new service (Rackspace). This new hosting service provides a dedicated virtual server that I alone administrate. No more shared server space or shared bandwidth.

My hope is that we’ll be fully migrated within 48 hours. In the meantime, please be patient with the slowness of the site.