Why site was slow and hard to access yesterday–and the white knight that came to the rescue

A number of you emailed me that my site was having problems and before I could figure it out, I got this email from the wonderful company that hosts my site, the Agathon Group, http://www.agathongroup.com/, aka, the white knight that came to the rescue:

Yvon,
This evening our automated monitoring systems alerted us that your site effectivechurchcom.com was running unusually slowly.  We identified a remote site that was attempting to guess your WordPress login by trying different password variations, 69817 times in a row!  We blocked that site and your server started behaving normally again.  We also disabled the file called xmlrpc.php that they were using to try to login.  Xmlrpc is an older WordPress feature that almost no one uses any longer, so there should be no ill effects for you.  If you know you ARE using xmlrpc for any reason, just let us know and we’ll put the file back.  Otherwise, no action is required on your part.
Hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving!
Alan Ritari
support@agathongroup.com

They have hosted my site ever since I started it and they have been a joy to work with the entire time. I feel like I know a good bit about church communications, but there is so much I don't know about web hosting and all that can go wrong. At present it's mostly me trying to do it all and I don't feel the ministry could really function without them. They answer my questions kindly, take care of tech stuff I don't understand (like SSL certificates) and help me even when I don't know to ask, like today.

They are honestly all great Christian people--I met many of them personally years ago when the Gospel Com group was active. These guys did some of the pioneering work on the Christian Internet and they have served the Lord faithfully in technology ever since then.

In addition, unlike some of the commercial sites today, they don't buy you with all kinds of extra junk you don't need and don't spam you about extras--they just do their job and do it well.

Obviously if you want a hosting site--I highly recommend them and this season of the year am especially thankful for Agathon and all they do to help church communicators.