site was down half the afternoon

Yes, FlickFilosopher.com was offline for several hours this afternoon. The server my site was on crashed because my site, among others, were hogging the CPU. Now, I had no idea that Movable Type was a CPU hog (my large database apparently also contributes to the hoggage), but my Web host moved me (and the other sites) to another server with a lower load, so the problem should be resolved now.

Of course, that meant the DNS for FlickFilosopher.com had to repropagate, which may have made the site appear to be still down on some users’ ends for a while after the move.

It doesn’t seem like I’m in trouble with my Web host -- this was, in any event, the first indication I had from them that there was any sort of problem with this site -- but I’m trying to figure out how to reduce the CPU load, if I can. I think upgrading to the latest version of MT will help, so it looks like I’m gonna have to fast-track that project.

I’ve lost half a day’s worth of blogging while I was dealing with this, so I’ll try to catch up this evening.

support


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Error messages are not always very accurate as to the real cause of the error, think Windows; in this case, the message told me your "account had been suspended", which made it sound as if you had done something really bad. I spent all afternoon wondering what you'd been up to......

Your hosting service has a lot of chutzpah, to be running their own ads all over your pages after they left your site down for such a long stretch.

I wonder, does their claim about you "hogging the CPU" on the server mean they aren't going to honor their 99.9% uptime guarantee?

Of course I'll understand if you don't answer that because it would violate a non-disclosure agreement, although the existence of such would be another strike against the hosting company. I wish you all the best in your efforts to resolve the problems, whatever the cause.

(I actually called your hosting company's toll free line to tell them they were losing me as a future potential customer if they didn't fix your site, but of course they don't actually have any live operators, and just wanted me to leave a voice mail. Addiction is a scary thing. :)

ah! i wondered why i couldn't get onto the site -- i was blaming my office computer (our system here is heavily loaded with firewalls and "fun" disablers and it slows *everything* down).

mine kept saying something like: website not found, or no such persons, or "unauthorized publisher..."

Error messages are not always very accurate as to the real cause of the error, think Windows; in this case, the message told me your "account had been suspended", which made it sound as if you had done something really bad. I spent all afternoon wondering what you'd been up to......

Well, my account *had* been suspended... while the host was moving it to the other server. It sounded much worse than the situation actually was, though.

Your hosting service has a lot of chutzpah, to be running their own ads all over your pages after they left your site down for such a long stretch.

My host is not responsible for that ad: they have no control over any of the content of the site, not even adspace. Fused isn't like Blogger -- they're not placing ads on my site as a requirement of hosting, or anything like that. I've placed that ad there in the hopes of generating some affiliate revenue (I get paid if someone signs up for hosting.)

I still recommend Fused, highly. They were on top of the problem right away, and where another host might have penalized me or cancelled my hosting, as I've learned some hosts do in my surfing to try to figure out how to prevent this from happening again, Fused just moved me to another server where the same issue shouldn't happen again anyway.

(I actually called your hosting company's toll free line to tell them they were losing me as a future potential customer if they didn't fix your site, but of course they don't actually have any live operators, and just wanted me to leave a voice mail. Addiction is a scary thing. :)

Thanks for the support. But I've never had any trouble getting superquick responses to any issue I've had.

I won't deny that today has been *very* frustrating. But it could have been *much* worse than it was.

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posted:
Wed Jul 15 09, 5:33PM

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