Waterfall Chart
I’m back (I think)
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
Update (11 April): It’s been a week since I switched hosting companies, and aside from some minor start up issues, the web site and the blog have been performing admirably.
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So I’m partially back in business. After getting no help over the phone support and no responses to my increasingly irate emails, I finally received an email in pidgin English, saying something like “I notice your website is suspend, hence I unsuspend from this back end. There are no more issues in the site.” The web site and blog are now up after over 24 hours in limbo. Unfortunately my email and ftp capabilities are still in the toilet, and from a business standpoint, these are more important.
I had no forewarning that anything was amiss, just suddenly the site was kaput. After I called about the suspension, the hosting company told me my account was suspended because of abuse and violation of my terms of service, so I thought maybe somebody had claimed I’d posted copyrighted material (which is all I could find in the terms of service agreement that sounded like “abuse”). Then I got an email saying it was due to a violation of the policy on number of apache connections. There was no mention of this in the agreement, other than a vague clause that referred to “overuse of the CPU”; nowhere could I find any metrics for such overuse, nor any way for me to monitor my site’s performance. Violations of the “clearly stated” and “measurable” tenets of Total Quality.
When I wondered about all of this to the tech on the phone, he said it’s a problem with a popular blog (which this isn’t really yet, but I hope it will become). That savant obviously never thought about the consequences of angering the owner of a popular blog.
Posted: Thursday, March 20th, 2008 under Rant.
Comments: 8
Comments
Comment from Jay
Time: Thursday, March 20, 2008, 11:49 pm
Jon,
I am relieved to see your new post (back in business).
Yesterday, I was surprised and disappointed to see your site and blog missing.
I belive that your blog is already extremely popular and therefore is becoming additional load for the host.
Better start planning for a new host!!
Thanks. Keep it coming, please.
Jay
Comment from Yawar Quadir Amin
Time: Friday, March 21, 2008, 12:14 am
Sounds like the hosting provider is a dud. You might want to bail and find a more reliable provider while your site is still getting relatively few hits. By the way, I am hooked on your blog, and I have it on my feed reader. Thanks for the great Excel tips!
Comment from Jon
Time: Friday, March 21, 2008, 1:22 am
Jon,
Glad to see you’re back up and I hope everything is OK.
I don’t know, but I think there must be a significant difference between the server needs of a traditional web site vs. the needs of a blogging site. I say this because by design blogs allow others to hit you with a huge amount of traffic via comments, trackbacks, pingbacks, etc. Much of this traffic is automated and, once the robots know you’re out there, the shear volume of their “attacks” can bring your site down if the server needs are not adequate.
As a suggestion, have you considered using a setup similar to John Walkenbach’s J-Walk Blog? As I recall, when John started his blog he experienced the exact same problem that you just did. The blog ran fine for a while but then it crashed. I believe he eventually moved to a different provider - pMachine Hosting which recently changed its name to EngineHosting. I don’t recall reading on his blog that he’s had any server related problems since.
I’m first tried using ExpressionEngine and EngineHosting only because I saw that John was. I figured John’s site will always have 10,000 times more entries, comments, viewers, and general traffic than mine ever will. If his hosting provider can handle that kind of traffic then it can certainly handle my 30 hits a day. I’ve never had a reason to look back.
My experience with EngineHosting as a web provider has been very positive and professional. I’ve used them for several different sites for almost five years now without a single issue. For the questions that I have had, they’ve responded very quickly and positively. Additionally, I prefer ExpressionEngine as a blogging software because you can easily build in multiple layers of security to filter out unwanted traffic. Filtering out the unwanted traffic can help to reduce the server load.
I don’t want to sound like a commercial, but I have had a very positive experience and thought I would pass it on.
John Mansfield
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Friday, March 21, 2008, 8:04 am
Thanks everyone for the thoughts. My hosting company is in the process of transitioning everyone to a new platform, and I suspect the problems are related to that transition (I’m scheduled to move over this weekend). Before I do anything rash I will see how the new platform works. However, there have been incompletely resolved issues aver the past few months, and customer service has not been a shining beacon of excellence during this latest episode.
Blogs do result in greater system demands. A static page is fetched and dumped, but a blog entry requires several database queries and merging of a number of pages. I don’t know whether it needs upgrading my account to a virtual server (and becoming a real web admin, yech) or merely finding a host with greater CPU capabilities. But if a one-month old blog with a few hundred hits a day causes this kind of problem, what happens with the popular blogs that get thousands of hits an hour?
John - thanks for the suggestions. I’ve gotten addicted to WordPress; it’s very capable and very extensible via a plethora of plugins. Dave Barry might think that “A Plethora of Plugins” is a good name for a rock band.
Comment from Dan
Time: Friday, March 21, 2008, 4:12 pm
Are you using Buffalo Web Hosting via GoDaddy?
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Friday, March 21, 2008, 4:54 pm
Dan - Is there an issue with GoDaddy? My wife has a site there (much less invovled than mine), and they are one of my options. I’m open to suggestions.
Comment from Bob Helliesen
Time: Friday, March 21, 2008, 6:15 pm
I wondered why my emails kept bouncing.
Comment from Dan
Time: Friday, March 21, 2008, 9:14 pm
Jon,
I’ve read enough GoDaddy horror stories to want to stay away from them due to customer service issues.
Here’s one link — there are many others.
http://freelancefromhome.blogspot.com/2007/11/godaddy-sucks-how-godaddy-cost-me-my.html
I think most hosting companies at the low end have difficulty providing great customer service; they are simply not geared toward providing support to customers spending $10/month with them.
I use DreamHost, and they have had their share of problems as well — search for “DreamHost sucks” and you’ll see reports of bad service and double-billing. I like their open and relaxed attitude, though. I feel like if I run into a problem, they would actually resolve it.
That said, I am not recommending DreamHost, I think hosting experiences are so personal that it is tough to do a straightforward comparison.
Good luck!
Dan
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