I promised you an update on what is happening with the Wizard’s Tower Bookstore. Here it is.

When you run an ecommerce site it is inevitable that you will come under attack from hackers. That’s even more the case if you are selling digital downloads, because people want to be able to steal the content to put it on torrent sites. As a store owner, you have to rely on your hosting company to protect you from this. You have neither the skill nor the time to do it yourself.

I continue to be confident that my store was secure. I would not have been selling other people’s books if I wasn’t. Nevertheless, attacks happened and recently I discovered to my horror that this was costing me a lot of money.

You see, many hosting companies put a limit on the bandwidth your site is allowed to use. Hacking attacks, especially things like brute force attempts to guess a password, mean that the servers are being constantly pounded by bots. And of course some people launch denial of service attacks at websites just for fun. My bookstore was getting pounded in this way, and the hosting company was charging me for the excess bandwidth used. At one point on Monday the site ran up 2 GB of bandwidth usage in an hour. My monthly limit was 20 GB, and overage charges were £2/GB. Hopefully you can see why I had to put a stop to that.

The hosting company claimed that it was impossible for them to screen out all bot attacks, and it was my duty as a store owner to keep an eye on bandwidth usage and block any IP addresses that were causing problems. If necessary, they said, I should block entire countries. At the time, most of the bot attacks were coming from Japan and The Netherlands. I think you can see why I didn’t like this idea. Cybercrime is not limited to third world countries.

So eventually we came to a more or less amicable parting of the ways. They agreed to waive all outstanding charges, and I agreed to go elsewhere. It is a real shame in some ways as I liked their store software. If they had been able to outsource the actual hosting to a big server farm I’d still be there, but their charges for both disc space and bandwidth were way above industry norms, even without any excess charges.

What I’m doing now is testing some alternative store software. These folks, to be precise. You’ll note that they offer unlimited bandwidth. If anyone has experience of using them I’d be very pleased to hear from you. I’m hoping that I can get a new store at least started by the end of next week, because I have Juliet’s book to launch. Whether the store continues to sell books by other publishers or not depends on whether they wish to continue working with me, and on certain other business considerations that I am not yet at liberty to talk about. One way or the other, however, the books should be available again in a month or so.