Pair Disabled the Cafes

It really is time to switch to a more reliable host. Last night as I was at the vet with my cat (sadly, for the last time) Pair Networks turned off The Cafes with little to no notice. They sent a form e-mail with no useful information:

Due to problems it was causing on the server, we were forced to disable the
following script located in your account:

/usr/www/users/elharo/cafe

For future reference, please take a look at our script usage policies:

http://www.pair.com/pair/policies/resource.html
http://www.pair.com/pair/policies/cgiresource.html

Please take a few moments to look over your script for any obvious problems
before using “chmod 755” (via ssh) or using your FTP client to reenable
the executable permissions of the script.

If you have any questions about this script, please contact our friendly
support specialists at support@pair.com or 412-381-7247 (option 2).

The message is inaccurate. /usr/www/users/elharo/cafe isn’t a script. It’s the complete web site.

I’ve turned the site back on, but since they didn’t tell me what the problem actually was, I have no way of knowing if the problem is still there or not. I posted a new article on Friday, and it hit Hacker News yesterday, so there’s been a spike in traffic but still in the 10,000 hits a day range, nothing serious.

Update: according to Garrett H.

Your site was simply receiving too much traffic today. It is a WordPress site, which tend to be more resource-intensive. It was causing problems on the server, and since it is a shared hosting environment, we need to allow other customers on the server to also have fair access to the
servers’ resources.

Here’s my response:

This is absolutely unacceptable. I will be looking elsewhere for hosting immediately, and recommending others do the same. That I posted an article people are actually interested in reading is no reason to turn off the site. If your servers can’t handle the trivial load of 10,000 page views a day, you need to upgrade your servers. If a hosted site sees a spike in traffic significant enough to affect other sites, then you need to allocate more resources to the site, not turn it off. The control center shows my bandwidth at less than 20% of what I’m paying for. Clearly Pair has dramatically oversubscribed its resources, and is not suitable for any marginally professional site.

Anyone have a recommendation for a new host? Perhaps I should just turn off the ads and move it all to IBiblio. Despite charging me absolutely nothing, they’ve still managed to provide vastly more reliable service for the last 15 years than any ISP or web host I’ve ever worked with.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 5:08 AM and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can skip to the end and make a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.