I went back to my hometown for the summer with a couple of things in mind. One was to give my kid more room to play. That is supposed to be the appeal of the countryside: open space, fewer walls, a different rhythm. In reality, once we got there, there were hardly any children around. Most kids had not come back; they were either still in the city or hiding indoors with phones. Add the peak summer heat, and I went a whole week without seeing more than a handful of kids.
Keeping a child entertained was not complicated in itself. Feed them, spend a little money, inflate the pool, and they can splash around for hours every day. But it still eats time, and the pool came with its own small obsession. A few hours after inflating it, I could see it had already lost some air. I could not find the leak. I only knew it went soft within an hour or so. The pool has three rings: the top one held up best, the bottom one was slightly worse, and the middle one leaked most obviously. I kept wanting to fix it, even though I never found the hole.
The second reason for going home was to sit down and work on my website, learn a bit more, and update content. That plan turned into a five-day fight with an Alibaba Cloud server and BaoTa panel.
Something was clearly wrong
I cannot say for sure whether it was a vulnerability or something else, but my site had almost certainly been compromised. I had email alerts turned on, and for several days I kept getting notices that someone had changed my password or registered users in WordPress. Neither of those things should have happened under normal circumstances. Just as I was getting ready to deal with it, I found that a friend's blog had also been hit with ad malware. I contacted Wei and got a clearer picture of what was going on.
On paper, the fix was routine: reinstall the system, reinstall the BaoTa panel, then restore only the low-risk images and database. In practice, it was much messier.
I tried more than ten different ways to install the system and BaoTa. Every time I got them set up and configured a single site, BaoTa would stop running. I spent days going back and forth with Alibaba Cloud support. They said it was memory exhaustion, that the instance did not have enough RAM, and suggested either buying a higher-spec server or enabling SWAP virtual memory. I did what they said and ran plenty of tests. I even used another ID to sign up for the 99-yuan Shenzhen promotional server, installed the system and BaoTa, created a test site, and it still died the same way. That led me to a blunt conclusion: an Alibaba Cloud 2-core, 2 GB instance plus BaoTa for running a site will basically lock up.
A different panel, a workable compromise
I checked Baidu Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Huawei Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud. The 99-yuan promotional instance was really the only one that fit my budget; the others were simply too expensive. So the choice was either to give up on a mainland China environment and use a Hong Kong server, or find another way to make the 99-yuan 2-core, 2 GB machine useful.
After some testing, I found a route that worked: install the 1Panel panel instead.
I had two reasons for trying it. One was to learn and use the panel in depth. The other was to see whether it could keep server utilization and load in a reasonable, smooth range. It turned out that with 1Panel, and without checking Alibaba Cloud's various antivirus and security protection options, the server really did stop choking. 1Panel and BaoTa differ in both workflow and logic, which was actually helpful for understanding how each one is designed.
That ended the five-day mess of malware and BaoTa freezes. If I cannot beat the problem, at least I can avoid it. I hope no other hacker decides to keep poking at things. There is nothing valuable on a small site like mine. Still, the scale of scanning and attacks makes me think it has a lot to do with how powerful AI has become.
After restoring all the sites, I plan to go through the email reply feature from top to bottom and improve it properly. Then I can get back to normal communication. If anyone spots a problem, leave a comment and I will fix it.