runs off of a host computer in Houston where the data we all contribute is stored. I know that some people in the family assume that it comes off our computers but in fact we have been renting server space from a company called IVhosting. It was the best price I found and it had been going O.K., as a matter of fact I'd sent them several hundred dollars worth of other clients this year, but everything went to hell yesterday when we all started seeing the "contact the billing/service department message".
I think this all started when they had the outage last week and we lost that small amount of data. I got a service desk reply from them saying they had trouble with an ungrade to their kernel. We went through a week of it being normal then yesterday our www.whippleworld.com domain was routed away from our index and to that nasty little suspension page. I didn't notice it until somebody in the family called. I stopped what I was doing and tried to contact IVhosting but for more than an hour I got "site not found" errors at both their sales and support URL. That was very odd. Their sites did come up later and I was able to create a trouble ticket (they don't take phone calls which I think is to protect them from their clients when things aren't going well) and instead of getting us back up and running they sent an email in the middle of the night saying they don't want us back on their servers because we use too much of their system resources. Our site gets good traffic for a family blog, undeniably more than most, but nothing like a successful commercial website where thousands of people come everyday. We have no idea what their system resource limits are but the "hosting reseller" program we paid for was advertised to supposed to be able to host not just one but many successful commercial sites. I never could have dreamed that our site would be too much for it and it seems very questionable that it is. Even if we are somehow using more headroom than we realize, the way they are handling it is awful.
Our service has two main parameters and I monitor them to make sure we aren't going over. They are the amount of data that we put on their hard drives, that's "storage" and how much data we run back and forth over their Internet connection while viewing and posting which is "bandwidth". We're under the 3 gigs of storage and at an average of less than half the bandwidth we pay for. What they are saying is that we use higher "system resources" than they want. That's a fine print deal in their policy statement, we aren't suppose to exceed 25% of the server's resources for more than 90 seconds. If all of us hit the site for the same 90 second period, maybe that would happen. Of course they don't give any way to monitor that so it's an unknown to us. More likely, they may be having trouble or growing pains and are just booting active sites off to try to increase headroom and right their ship. Like we rent from them, they actually rent from EV1 which is a big server farm (a building with hundreds or thousands of rackmounted computers) in Houston and they might be over their limits. Or maybe they just treat good clients this way on a regular basis. I have some contacts at EV1 and I'm going to call them on Monday and see what I can learn about these guys. Or as Chris says, maybe it's one guy.
Chris Mackenzie has been with our blog from the beginning and he's a computer server expert for Clear Channel. He's looking at the problem with his inside knowledge.
The bottom line is that we'll be getting another host but it'll take a couple of days at least. If it turns out that they are right and something on our site is a resource hog, we might have to adjust for that. If the Wimpy MP3 player is using too much system resources, we'll have to stream that stuff from another server. That would take ten minutes to set up. We have other server space, we just don't have server space with MySQL database setup that can operate the Wordpress software that Whippleworld needs.
Our concern is all the data. The reason for all these details is that Whippleworld is about sharing as much as you care to read about the learning experience of programing and maintaining a website. It's an experience, all right.
The database of the text and the links were backed up a week ago. I haven't ever RESTORED one of these databases so like they say, a backup isn't known good until you've successfully restored it. Chris is inspecting the files right now BUT I know for certain that I don't have all the images backed up. A successful restore onto another server right now would have all the text but wouldn't have the photos. At this moment I'm very unhappy with IVhosting they redirected our domain without so much as an email of warning and now they have our data which is our property and have cut off our access to get to it.
Everybody that has every kept a site going seems to have one or more nightmare hosting stories... sounds like we're having our first right now. We'll post the info on how it goes. I hope it starts getting better and not nastier with these IVhosting guy(s).
