Well, fantastic. I had good news and I had bad news.
The good news- the Brandon Kraft family of websites is popular. Between this site, The Brandon Kraft Foundation, my personal portal, the Save Players! effort and an unannounced Catholic Thinker project, there was enough activity to lead to an abnormal and unacceptable level of server load for the account I was on.
My account previously was a “shared” hosting solution. In short, myself and 30-50 other people were all being hosted on the same actual computer. We were like a little community. You know what it’s like living with other people. Imagine a really large community like that.
Now imagine if one in those 50 people used up 25% of the hot water all of the time. Or caused brownouts because he used all of the electricity. Or parked in 25% of the parking spaces all at once.
I was that guy.
My service provider, HostGator, took an approach that overall, I didn’t like.
Without notice that I was such a bother, they suspended my account. E-mail, website, everything around 11 p.m. last Monday. I discover the problem at Midnight and instantly start calling/e-mailing them to figure out 1) why I was suspended and 2) how can I get my site back up.
They told me various things, none of those things had a solid action plan associated with them, except pay more for a higher system. Could I figure out what part of my site was draining most of the resources and attempt to curtail? Sure, but they didn’t provide any information to assist with that (besides it is a Perl module, which doesn’t narrow it down much except to say brandonkraft.net didn’t cause the problem). It took three days to get e-mali access again, and even then, I didn’t have access to e-mail sent during the down time. I’ve got most of it back, but I still have 36 hours of e-mail either in a queue somewhere or discarded.
So after three or four days of simply trying to figure out what they want me to do to begin to fix it, I still had no idea. They had given me a week from Monday to figure out everything before terminating my account and deleting my data.
Early Friday morning, I balked. I upgraded to the semi-dedicated plan. Instead of 50 people using the same computer, now it is about 2 or 3.
In short, I am finally back online but behind on my academic online postings. Need to get to that….
The good news- the Brandon Kraft family of websites is popular. Between this site, The Brandon Kraft Foundation, my personal portal, the Save Players! effort and an unannounced Catholic Thinker project, there was enough activity to lead to an abnormal and unacceptable level of server load for the account I was on.
My account previously was a “shared” hosting solution. In short, myself and 30-50 other people were all being hosted on the same actual computer. We were like a little community. You know what it’s like living with other people. Imagine a really large community like that.
Now imagine if one in those 50 people used up 25% of the hot water all of the time. Or caused brownouts because he used all of the electricity. Or parked in 25% of the parking spaces all at once.
I was that guy.
My service provider, HostGator, took an approach that overall, I didn’t like.
Without notice that I was such a bother, they suspended my account. E-mail, website, everything around 11 p.m. last Monday. I discover the problem at Midnight and instantly start calling/e-mailing them to figure out 1) why I was suspended and 2) how can I get my site back up.
They told me various things, none of those things had a solid action plan associated with them, except pay more for a higher system. Could I figure out what part of my site was draining most of the resources and attempt to curtail? Sure, but they didn’t provide any information to assist with that (besides it is a Perl module, which doesn’t narrow it down much except to say brandonkraft.net didn’t cause the problem). It took three days to get e-mali access again, and even then, I didn’t have access to e-mail sent during the down time. I’ve got most of it back, but I still have 36 hours of e-mail either in a queue somewhere or discarded.
So after three or four days of simply trying to figure out what they want me to do to begin to fix it, I still had no idea. They had given me a week from Monday to figure out everything before terminating my account and deleting my data.
Early Friday morning, I balked. I upgraded to the semi-dedicated plan. Instead of 50 people using the same computer, now it is about 2 or 3.
In short, I am finally back online but behind on my academic online postings. Need to get to that….
Leave a Reply