Why I’ll Learn To Love Gmail

career indie author postsI had to spend time rooting around my website. I had received an email from HostGator telling me that they couldn’t back up PlanetPeschel because of “inode,” which was about as unhelpful a message as one could get.

Fortunately, HostGator had a page explaining what the heck inode means. In plain English, I have too many files on my shared hosting. More than a 100,000 of them. They don’t mind my having them, they said, they’re just not going to back up all of them. And if you get to 250,000, they warned me, I’ll have to pay them and make some changes.

(Shared hosting, if I remember right, means my website’s on a server with a bunch of other sites.)

Anyway, this surprised me. I’ve got a lot of files on Planet Peschel, but 100K?

This is where Bill the Author has to turn to Bill the Tech Guy. I visited the backroom via cPanel, and fortunately, there was an easy pathway for me to follow to find out where my files were distributed.

The answer came back quickly: I have a plug-in on WordPress called AutoOptimize, which saves bits and pieces of the site to call them up quickly. Turns out my settings told it to save a lot of files. Like, 65,000 of them.

Once I got rid of them, Host Gator thanked me and said they’ll back up my site next week. Everyone’s happy (except me; I had to put a note down on my calendar a week from now to check my inode’s and see if they’re swelling again).

That has nothing to do with WordPress. This does: As I was rooting around, I noticed that there were a couple hundred emails that had been sent to the contact address for peschelpress.com.

Turns out most of them looked like this:

gmail spam

This is why I route all my email to Gmail, where their spam filters take out 98% of them.

As you may know, I’m in the process of writing a book called “Career Indie Author” that deals with the nuts and bolts of managing the business side of your career. Unfortunately, it’ll mean having yourself (or someone you trust) act as your IT in situations like this.

The best advice I can give to avoid a situation like this is to keep your website simple. If you use WordPress, only add the plug-ins you need. It’s easy to tinker and try new things, but if you’re planning to run your career like a business, you won’t have time to do what I’m doing. Trust me.