Misadventures

AI crawler server crashRedis ErrorWordPress

Down for Ten Minutes: How a Pile-Up of AI Bots Took Out Two Client Sites (And What I Changed Afterwards)

I had an early night planned. Instead, I got an SOS email from a client: their site was down, showing a cryptic error about something called “Redis.” A few minutes later, I realised a second client site — hosted on the same server — was down too. Here’s the investigation that followed, what actually caused it, and what I changed as a result. If you run a website — or a few — I think there’s something useful in here for you too, because this isn’t really a story about my server. It’s a story about where web traffic is...
Email & DeliverabilityWooCommerceWordPress

Why Your Migadu Sending Limit Isn’t a Migadu Problem

You’re hitting Migadu’s 100 outbound emails per day cap. Clients are missing order confirmations. You’re eyeing the Standard plan at $290 and wondering how you got here. Before you reach for your wallet, check your logs. There’s a good chance the problem isn’t Migadu at all — and if you’re on Zoho, cPanel hosting mail, or any other mailbox service with a daily send cap, the same applies to you. This is a category-wide characteristic of mailbox hosting, not a quirk of any one provider. The fix is the same regardless of which one you’re on and Claude is handy...
FixesWooCommerceWordPress

Advanced Coupons Tab Won’t Go Away? Here’s the Fix

If you’ve ever removed a plugin from a client’s WooCommerce site and noticed a ghost tab still hanging around under WooCommerce > Marketing, you’re not alone. In this case, the culprit was the Advanced Coupons tab — still showing up and displaying a promo page for a plugin that had been uninstalled. Cheeky. What’s Going On? A quick dig through the WordPress.org support threads turned up the developer’s response: “You may see the ‘Advanced Coupon’ tab on your website because you have some of our other plugins installed. This is simply a static page that won’t impact your site’s performance...