Site Outages
Sorry about this folks. I have the strong suspicion that when I was subjected to massive spam and hotlinking attacks a month ago, my web host transferred me to a “bad behavior” server, where users constantly hog the CPU and other server resources and cause everyone else to be shut down for hours on end. Maybe not, it could be a coincidence, but after those attacks on my site, my own site started being shut down by abuse on other sites on my server–at least four times now by my count, each time for many hours at a go. The last one just ended about 5 minutes ago.
I hope this can get resolved, whatever it is, and service back to usual reliable standards. In the meantime, if you come here and the site is down, come and visit again later. My apologies for the inconveniences.
Who’s your host, Luis? Sounds to me like you might want to consider moving to a better one.
The host is Surpass Hosting (owned by DimeHost). I am not yet convinced that they did what I think they did. Every web host has bad spots. The question is how they deal with them. If I keep getting the site shut down, I will probably start looking for a better web host. But you have to remember that web hosts *all* act like this from time to time. It’s a matter of getting the sense that a web host is going downhill. Surpass might not be there yet, or they might be well down the way. I have yet to come to any conclusions yet….
Well, I don’t necessarily agree with the idea that all hosts are the same, but if you are not displeased with your current host, you can certainly spare yourself the hassle of moving your site.
I generally find that $10/month seems to be the dividing line between really good hosts and the questionable ones.
By the way, the “Send me an email when somebody writes another comment” box is always checked when I make comments here, but I notice that I never get e-mail when somebody writes another comment. Is that feature disabled for some reason?
Sorry, I should have specified cheap web hosts. Agreed in that the more you pay, the better service can become. But with the cheaper web hosts, the problems I’m suffering from are pretty standard. The bail-out threshold is usually a question of whether your problems are a temporary glitch or string of glitches, or if is a new level of bad service that will more or less continue. I have left three web hosts–AIT, Aletia, and Myacen–when they became too unreliable to run a blog site without constant supervision and expectation of service failure. So far, Surpass has not reached that threshold, but they could if these outages continue…