Down Again
Jan 17th, 2008 by Don Ray
Too bad the title isn’t about the price of gas and not Chiriquí Chatter. Yesterday was the second day in a row that my web host had problems. The thing that annoys me the most is the notification that they place on the Internet, when they are having problems. I am paid up until September of 2008.
I requested that they alter their notification to one that reflects that they are having technical difficulties.
I received a notice that they were moving me to a different server because I was one of the top three sites they were getting hits from. I hope they solve the problem, because I am not anxious to start shopping for a different provider. They suggested a dedicated server, but I can’t afford that.
Don:
I’ll speak to someone about changing the message. However, your site was suspended because it was causing a lot of load on the server. Top 3 actually. Load dropped from 30 to 4 since the suspensions. We’re looking to move you off to another server that can accomodate your usage, however, you should seriously look into the private-hosting service, your blog requires the dedicated resources that it provides.
After the move, I no longer have access to Fantastico or AWSTATS, which allow for updating to the latest WordPress, and other programs I use, as well as providing the usage stats.
It may be time for me to start studying my options. This is a hobby and as such it needs to be reasonably cheap. If it brought in an income, then that would be a different story. I don’t want advertisers, because then what you write, would have to satisfy them.
I never thought that I would have enough traffic to have to move my site (and I am not sure it does now) and I am not exceeding any advertised limited for my provider. This is a quandary.
UPDATE: I have been notified that awstats has been enabled and that fantastico will be available for upgrades. Progress is being made.
Hang in there, Don Ray. You’re too big a part of our lives to go away easily. If we need to limit our visits, we’ll do that, too (sort of).
I remeoved the Chat facility which also monitiored everyone when they entered. I have a hunch that the scripts for that facility may have been causing some of the problem.
I think I will create a hotmail address that will allow chatting and that will be more efficient.
It is too bad that the web host didn’t have or didn’t use sophisticated monitoring software to find out where the time was being spent.
My gut feel is that the removal of this facility, will solve the problem.
Look for another provider NOW. There is no way your site should be causing bandwidth problems for them. I don’t mean in any way, to belittle your site, in fact I consider it one of the top sites about Panama, but you simple don’t have enough traffic to cause the problems you’ve been having, and if you’re one of their top three, they obviously don’t have many high traffic customers. That suspended account notice alone would be enough to make me move. They are blaming their screwup on you by leaving your visitors with the impression that you haven’t paid your bill.
Take a look at GoDaddy (http://godaddy.com). One of my sites gets 5 GB disk space and 250 GB bandwidth for $3.99 per month. My big site, http://panamaretire.net has 100GB diskspace and 1000 GB bandwidth for $9.99/month. I bought a domain from them last night and within an hour had uploaded the first file to it.
Henry
I tend to agree with you Henry. However, I am going to see if the problems disappear with the old Site Help Function removed. I am surprised that that script could have been the culprit, but I know it did trace each visitor and monitored which articles were read.
If the problem happens again, I will look for a replacement site.
Hello Guys,
I thought I’d leave a few comments regarding the outages here regarding the issues as of late. Don has been a very patient and long standing customer for Vistapages (we host http://www.chiriquichatter.net), so he deserves some clarification.
It’s a common misconception that because you have been no where near the limitations of disk space or bandwidth that your web site cannot cause issues on a shared hosting server. We have customers pumping several TB’s of bandwidth and others with over 70GB of data which have no problems. It usually boils down to PHP scripts that need to process lots of things.
In a shared hosting environment, which I like to call a free-for-all environment everyone is fighting for their share of the resources and unfortunately 3-4 sites were causing the large amounts of processes — one of them being this site. In the best interest of hundreds of other customers on that server, we are forced to suspend offending web sites, especially when it starts to get really bad. You’ll be amazed at how much we let it slide for some customers.
Don was offered our Private Hosting service, which eliminates suspensions, resource sharing and other downsides that are associated with shared hosting, however because of his budget, he was unable to afford it. We decided to move him and the other offending users to a server specifically provisioned for high-usage customers to allow him to continue to serve up pages without any issues. The previous server he was on was a Dual Core 2 Xeon, 4GB of ram, and a hardware RAID-1 storage solution. Hardly a “slow” server.
Another hosting customer that was suspended yesterday was utilizing so much processing power, that he’s even slowing down his Private Hosting account, which has dedicated processing/memory resources allocated to him — now imagine him competing against hundreds of other customers. I am sure you’ll see what I am saying.
As for the suspended page, we have had several customers complain about it. I would like to say that it is the default suspended page, however I’ll see what we can do to get it changed to something less offensive.
Hopefully this provides some insight. I’ve been doing this for over 10 years and customers are still confused and surprised when they are told their web sites are causing excessive load on servers while their “resources” are no where near their limits.
Don, if you still have any questions, drop me a line. I’ll be more than happy to discuss!
Hi Kaumil,
Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment.
I am not surprised at all that a few customers can put a large burden on servers ore even take them to their knees. I have worked in shared environments for over 35 years, 29 of which was EDS (one of the largest providers of computer services in the world).
In the EDS environment, it was possible to identify the problem down to the offending layer of code, making it much easier to fault isolate the problem.
I have a hunch that a specific function, which I had added to the sidebar of the blog, was causing the problem and with its removal, everything should be all right. Possibly with more information a move to a different server might not have been required.
I was experienced in trouble shooting problems in an IBM mainframe environment, but trouble shooting in a Linux or other small server environment without equivalent tools makes it difficult.
I am glad that the problem appears to be fixed.
Well, I guess I should file this under “Old Dog, New Tricks/You’re never too old to learn something”.
Forget my advice to find new hosting. Any outfit that will take the time to explain what’s really happening to a bunch of know-it-all old farts is worth keeping.
Hahahaah. Good point Henry!