The reason for this is because we needed to temporarily disable your website earlier today to prevent it from effectively “crashing” the webserver; your site was receiving a large number of hits to PHP scripts and was basically preventing other customers websites from loading. I have unsuspended the account now and the website should be back online — I would recommend that you remove any unused PHP scripts and upgrade all other applications to the latest version, as we will be forced to delete the account if further high CPU usage by your account continues to affect other customers.
So anyway, my provider killed it without telling me. I guess a mention on Massively was too much for it.
Anyone recommend a good host that can deal with the occasional traffic spike?
I’ve been using GoDaddy for a while for several sites. They have been able to scale very well with my traffic. The only time they ever shut me down was when I had a borked script that mercilessly banged on the server for days. In retrospect I can’t blame them. Other than that, no significant problems ever.
Don’t get me wrong Massively has some traffic, but it isn’t anywhere near as much to kill your site on a decent host. Is there any scripts you have added recently that might be very intensive per page load?
Regardless if you are looking for a hosting company I am a big fan of Dreamhost (for php) and DiscountASP.Net (for asp.net).
Glad to see you’re back up and running! Missed getting my daily dose. How kind of them to inform you of what was going on– oh, wait, they didn’t, until after the matter…. Mine do the same, I don’t suggest unified-hosting (which is mine).
Sorry we blew up your site. 🙂 Stop posting such interesting topics and insights on MMOs and we’ll promise to stop linking to you. Deal?
Dan O’Halloran
http://www.massively.com
I’m on Dreamhost and although I’ve never had quite the amount of traffic you had, there’s plenty of good things that has been said about it, including a recent article on Nerfbat. Otherwise if you’re not looking for a host switch, you could implement WP-Cache to cache content for a period as static files, reducing the PHP and MySQL access overheads.
Based on my usage logs, linking to my site couldn’t have killed it. What probably happened, for real, was when I mounted my blog on my Linux box as a remote file system using sshfs and left it mounted all day while I was at work — the day before. Only thing I can think of.
Excuses, excuses, Tipa. 🙂
Someone might of tried to hack in to it. And as i got down my blog role it does look like Keen and Graev’s blog did get hacked sometime in the last 24 hours.
While that’s a possibility, I really think it was sshfs — which essentially makes my hosted website part of my local file system, makes doing large scale copying and changes a LOT easier when you don’t have shell access on the host site (which I don’t). This gives me back the shell. I wasn’t aware it would put any strain on the web host. I had to place an old folder of images back up on my blog for the WoW RP post, because I had taken down all the old pictures to save space.
I’m glad you are back, regardless!
Thanks ) The definition of panic is being helpless at work while your web site dies.