When I logged in this evening, I had to actually log in, as if my cookies were gone. I figured it was just me, since we've been running mondo anti-virus checks on my machine. But Deb is also reporting the same problem.

FYI, one of my current favorite sites: [link] has been under internet attack and, ironically, is singing the praises of an old "friend" today:

Staving off yesterday's attack was relatively easy. For $150, I upped my server capacity by adding an additional Pentium 4 with lots of bells and whistles. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve too. I must say the hosting company I am using, HostRocket has been fantastic. I burned through half a dozen web hosting companies before finding them. The others all promised the moon in their ads but the promised service vanished instantly as soon as they got paid. Hostrocket is a big company, with tens of thousands of customers, many of them large companies, and the technical staff is knowledgeable and very oriented towards helping the customers. They have done a wonderful job dealing with this attack. If you need a web hosting company for your business where reliability and customer service are top priorities, I recommend them very highly.

I saw that too, Wolfram. I suspect that he is using a dedicated server with them. Our problems arose because we were using a shared server. We could have switched to a dedicated server with HR, but they were more expensive than iStrada, our current provider, IIRC.

I guess I was amazed by the whole "oriented towards helping the customers" description. Because if I remember correctly, NSM. Unless, apparently, you're a big spender.

I think we went from HostRockit to FanGeek, and only then to iStrada.

FanGeek

Who were wonderful and beautiful and terrific and great to us and our bandwidth hogging selves.

[edited to replace Ben's Bargain Center affiliate link with the Buffista Affiliate link]

I'd been wondering about this. So we do have a link whereby Buffistas gets some money off my Amazon purchases? Cause there should be an easy way to do that via Buffista Links or something, right? Cause if I remembered, I would do it.

Basically, it goes into my personal account, and I've been keeping track of purchases that are made via Buffistas (if I'm not sure, I add it to the Buffistas). To be honest, I haven't sent any of the money to Jesse because it's still small (less than $100, IIRC), and because we haven't needed it. But it's there as a supplemental rainy fund in case we do.

Thanks for doing that, Jon. A friend emailed me the link, so I didn't even notice that it was an affiliate link for someone else.

Is there a way to have person-independent affiliate links? Is it worth the bother to have a few affiliate links set up for a few shopping sites?