Tag Archives: Website

AdRotate Geo temporarily shut down

Today I woke up to 22 emails that my website was offline-online-offline and so on. Turns out some users are once again abusing AdRotate Geo by sending millions of requests to my API.

AdRotate Geo serves around 3 million requests per day. And scales pretty well for small to medium sites. Currently there are a couple of hundred users subscribed to AdRotate Geo. But getting upwards of 40 million requests per hour is a bit too much for my servers.

So, DDoS then, again… But they’re all real AdRotate Pro users as far as I can see. Valid authentification keys and api access… After some digging it turns out that it was AdRotate Geo being hammered with traffic from a bunch of AdRotate Pro users sites. Millions of requests per site? Come on. That’s not real traffic. Can’t be… Or is it.

After a while I got fed up with it and shut AdRotate Geo down until further notice. Sorry for the inconvenience…

Please use ipstack instead. You can make a free account to get free lookups per month. Or, if you want the more accurate MaxMind GeoIP2 that’s of-course an option too – But not for free 🙂

If you have any questions of comments, please let me know below or via the contact form. Thanks.

I’ll try to figure out what to do with AdRotate Geo in the meantime 🙁

Subscribe to the blog for updates and news

Did you know you can easily follow my blog via email and/or RSS Feeds? People often ask me; “is there an update for AdRotate Professional”. Or I get emails with support questions asking things that have either been fixed or added in later versions of the plugin. Clearly they didn’t know about updates. Some people didn’t update for years.

This is a security risk for various reasons, but also a big strain on support time. If I have to sort of copy paste “Update to the latest version, it’ll fix your issue” for half of the emails I have less time to answer real support questions.

So, as a result I finally (yes, long long overdue) took a look at the subscription options on the site. You can subscribe for email updates – Every time I post something on the blog you’ll get a email notification. I don’t have many subscribers.

There is also a RSS feed, nice and old-school. There are a whole bunch of subscribers on there, but not nearly what I was hoping for.

Subscribe on this page:
https://ajdg.solutions/notifications-and-updates/

On the AJdG Solutions Blog plugin updates, ongoing sales, website updates and tech related articles get posted. Mostly plugin updates though. Usually 4 to 6 articles per month.

Infrastructure upgrades and API changes

New infrastructure and servers

Over the last week I’ve been hard at work to finally resolve the issues with performance and up-time that plagued the AJdG Solutions website since mid December last year. MediaTemple kept denying any issues and couldn’t stop pointing fingers are everyone but themselves.

Very unprofessional for the stupendous amount of money I paid them monthly. But alas, their support was, as usual, completely inept. Too bad! So after a few days of frustratingly dealing with tickets and people pretty much ignoring me, I gave up and moved to a new hosting provider. So far that seems better and more stable.

I’m still ironing out some minor kinks, but so far so good.

Old AdRotate Geo API discontinued

Users of my AdRotate Pro plugin will know I offer various API for updates, AdRotate Geo and some other stuff.

Due to ongoing abuse of the older AdRotate Geo API, versions 1 and 2 will be obsolete effective immediately.

These API versions will soon be shut down and no longer return Geo Targeting information. If you’re still using AdRotate Versions 3.18.2 or older and you’re using AdRotate Geo, your geo targeting will no longer work in a few days.

Updating to the current version of AdRotate Pro will fix this and is the only solution. I’m not going to develop work-arounds or silly hacks. No need to ask… Just update the plugin!

A step-by-step update guide is available here.
If you need help with updating, or simply do not want to do it yourself you can use my AdRotate update service.

You are urgently advised to upgrade to AdRotate Pro 4 or newer. Version 4.11 has been released earlier today and is available for free for everyone who bought a license!

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