Less than expected

[bernicky]

I woke up this morning to find the website that earns the most for me had been shut down over night. As it turns out everything had been shut down. All email, all http - everything. The email pointed out that the RAM use was over 25% and therefore the site had to be shut down and that I should change the scripts or ban the user that was causing the problem (I am paraphrasing). Fair enough but how can I change anything when the site has been shut down? If the site cannot be accessed how can it be altered? There is a flaw in the system.

Generally speaking I have had good service and support from Host Gator but I really feel that they dropped the ball on this one. Telling me to make changes but preventing me from accessing the site are mutually exclusive. After finally getting FTP access (about 20 minutes ago) and shutting down the AOM script in question that has been running since I set up the site a few years ago and never caused an issue before I still have no access.

One area where things did go well, in retrospect, is my raging phone call to Host Gator this morning which was done in less than a calm tone. The person on the other end of the line remained calm and was detailed in their explanation of the problem but confessed that there was nothing to be done and that the problem had to be taken care of as a ticket so I am stuck waiting.

The biggest issue is not the short term loss of income but the loss of reputation in the comedy community. I have spent years building up a reputation with stand-up comics, bookers, managers, clubs and media PR reps from all the major distributors and that will turn to dust if the situation goes on much longer. It has been almost 11 hours now and my site is still down a few more and it will take me more years than I can think of to rebuild my reputation. The message on the main page when you fail to access seems to indicate that there is a billing problem - as if I cannot pay my bills. Yep that's the kind of thing that helps ones reputation. "This account has been suspended. Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible." Ya baby. Gotta love the subtext of that message.

[bernicky]

Well my site is back up more than 14 hours after being taken down. Curiously the log that was sent to me shows 20 some pages with 60 plus seconds GET taking down my entire website. Because Amazon was slow to respond (Amazon UK and US have been having bot problems since Monday) my site gets taken down in the middle of the night and a message goes up informing me that I should contact the billing and support department.

How about this replace the message with something that doesn't give the impression to site visitors that you are remiss in paying your bills in a timely fashion? Or something that points to the problem so the visitors can tell that the problem is a technical one? All in all I have to say Host Gator has really dropped in my estimation today.

[GatorRichard]

What is the ID of your ticket that you got from us? We were trying to look up more information but since no domain or ticket ID was mentioned, it makes it quite difficult to figure out.

[bernicky]

The domain that was taken down was www.theseriouscomedysite.com it is up and running and not making any money because I had to shut down all my shopping scripts in order to get the site back up. In the meantime another one of my sites was hit yesterday www.geekstreet.com with one user accessing the entire site over and over and over again using up a gig of transfer in very short order taking down the site due to lack of bandwidth - I upped the bandwidth this morning. There has to be a way to ban people who are doing this sort of things to site. I sent in a support request asking how to ban someone but have not yet received a reply.

My main domain is digitalshredder.com

[GatorChrisN]

Originally Posted by bernicky

...one of my sites was hit yesterday www.geekstreet.com with one user accessing the entire site over and over and over again using up a gig of transfer in very short order taking down the site due to lack of bandwidth - I upped the bandwidth this morning. There has to be a way to ban people who are doing this sort of things to site.

There is a way to do this. I do apologize if you haven't received a reply to your support ticket yet. All you need to do is log into your cPanel and go to Web/FTP stats and then to Awstats. This will show the top IP addresses hitting your site. You can block them by going back to the main cPanel screen and clicking on IP Deny Manager and adding those IP addresses to the list there. One thing you want to consider doing before blocking these IPs, though, is making sure they aren't a crawler/bot from a popular search engine like Google or Yahoo. You can do this by going to this site: http://remote.12dt.com/ and entering the IP to do a RDNS lookup. If it's something.google.com or something.yahoo.com, etc. you may want to look into your sitemap or meta tags or robots.txt and make sure that they are not causing the bots to keep indexing your site and getting lost in it indefinitely. If it's not a host you recognize, go ahead and block it. Here is a direct link to your cPanel's IP Deny mgr., just enter your username and password:

http://digitalshredder.com:2082/fron...yip/index.html

In regards to your site having been suspended, you may want to google "SQL optimization+scriptname" where scriptname is the name of your shopping cart script. A lot of times these scripts by default will use really inefficient queries causing your resource usage to skyrocket even when only a few processes are running.

We really do appreciate your business, if you still have unresolved issues just provide us with the ticket numbers here and someone will look into them further. I hope this helps somewhat!