Thanks for the help, James!
I know it's relatively simple to do websites: at one of my former employers I used to take care of their site. My enemy is time: I literally have only minutes per week to spend on programming these days. The specific problem at the iPage eCommerce site is: for many years their staff spent the time to monitor the traffic in/out of the websites they host, and when, for example, a 'bot would put the SAME data into every website under their umbrella, they would retaliate to its source and get it stopped, protecting all their customers from being infested. The many 'bots out there are breaking past the limits set up on fields (like Name, Address, etc., limited length and formats, numeric only fields and the like) and insert entire pages if information into places like "Customer Name". In short order these use up all the available memory allocation for the site, and it stops responding to anyone trying to browse it. Then their server notices that it is exceeding the memory allocation I am paying for, and it (sometimes) then sends me a notice that I'm running out of space. I'll go in a look at it and find it has used up a terrabyte or more, which is physically impossible given the Name/Address/e-mail contact data I have (had) for the customers so I can contact them if needed. There were about 600 such entries in the entire database, as many riders don't fill it in, they just get the email contact and we go from there. When this all fills up, iPage shuts the site down and tells me I owe them more money for more space, and it's not real. And, I won't pay it: it's no me doing it.
When going in to clean out the bogus entries, I'll find entire pages of information entered into each field, so the 'bots just overwhelm and break the iPage formatting limits.
The "live" hackers come in similarly and write in their own languages. I'd find Russian, German, Spanish, Iranian (I had to ask someone what language that one was...), and several South African dialects promising stuff like 'nude women will climb all over you' and worse, and many 'get rich quick' schemes after getting it translated. Whole stories are being written into the memory space, simply breaking the formatting and filling in characters at their will.
When I contacted iPage for them to do what they promised (and did for years) to maintain against these entities, I found out they were no longer in California. They were based out of an office in Florida and owned by someone else (ENOM) and I was to pay hundred$ to have them maintain my site. Well, that's not possible, nor even reasonable: they broke their end of the iPage agreement, which was for $150 per year to maintain the site availability. At first I spent every Monday evening (3-6 hours) removing the bogus entries, but now the site isn't even available to me, instead posting up a "Server error" message when I try to access it. I don't even have every Monday night available anymore, either.
So, like all things internet, it's garbage and needs to be thrown out and a new bag put into the can. I won't be doing it with any financial links, either: I lost so much money from them initially hacking my Paypal that I simply will not put monetary transactions into the site. This stems from a different situation, which was the theft of my identity by a crooked State of Colorado employee in 2006 (along with 10,000 others) when he got mad at his State employer, stole the State database to his laptop, and quit. Then he sold the info to the internet: I lost thousands of $$ from my retirement and bank accounts before getting it stopped (as did many others where I worked in those days, as we all were in that database), then my Paypal had to have special restrictions put on it, too, as they follow by the SSN of Americans, and that's out there, unprotected now. That's still in effect and will remain, so I won't do the online sales thing. I have made special arrangement with Paypal for out-of-USA transactions, and since the ITN numbers did not exist at the time of the theft, that's as secure as Paypal will be: that's adequate, and simple enough. I don't need more than that, so no on-site transactions will occur: the User must contact me and we make any payment arrangements between us.
