Walking on Broken Glass with Exabytes.com

Posted by GilaChess
July 13, 2007

That’s how I feel right now because the company that hosts this blog, Exabytes.com can suspend my account anytime if theyt feel my site is using too much CPU power on their webserver.

You see this blog is hosted on a “shared” hosting account. Meaning on one PC, there are more than one website that takes a share in the harddisk. So if anyone of the website takes too much processing power, it will slow down the other websites. That is why webhosting companies put it in their agreement clause to terminate a customer’s account if found to be in violation of overusing the CPU processes.

If anyone of you visited this site on Wednesday afternoon, you’d notice it was down for at least 6 hours. That was the time I was frantically trying to convince Exabytes that I didn’t intentionally botch up their shared webserver by running something that sucked up their CPU power. After all I’m just running a blog and not some live chat or heavy forum website. I finally got them convinced by removing most of my extra plugins used on this blog and deleting my Judit Polgar fan club website. (After the big relief of getting my account reinstated by Exabytes, I went out to buy supper to celabrate only to get robbed outside my house :( )

It’s a terrible feeling to have your account suspended (I just paid up for the year on March 2007) and losing your entire website. I’m making sure I’m using all lightweight plugins and I don’t even dare to post or edit too much content on this blog. I am so paranoid that I don’t even dare install a new plugin or upgrade my WordPress to a newer version. Later I’m to completely delete the old scripts and reinstall the new WordPress 2.2.1 and slowly but carefully add only the most important plugins.

I’m convinced that Exabytes has some setting that is not optimised to host WordPress blogs on their server. This in turn made them erroneously flag my website as a CPU hog. If I had some control or monitor tools I can pinpoint what the problem is. The Systems Engineer did email me a screenshot of the CPU usage but it was not helpful to tell me what was the trouble making script at my end. In the past, Exabytes Engineers were exemplary because they emailed me detailed info and even told me the possible cause. I would take their advice and delete the offending scripts and things would go back to normal. All that without my account getting suspended. Those were friendlier times…

With shared hosting, you have limited control. So I’m looking for a better webhost company that is more optimised to handle WordPress scripts. No offence to Exabytes but I really feel they have a problem with blogs. At least they certainly have problem with this blog even though I usually get about 100 plus visitors a day. I shudder to think what would happen when there is heavier traffic at peak times during the Malaysian Open next month.

Mark Weeks the webmaster of Chess.About.com remarked that my website was frequently down. I complained to Exabytes and they said someone else was hogging CPU resources. Now I’m on the other side of the fence being accused of being the CPU hogger :)

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Comments

I noticed that too with a box prompting for a username and password keep popping up whenever I try to get to the site. I thought you were doing some maintenance.

Comment by Papyn Chase on July 13, 2007 @ 10:23 pm

Nope that was Exabytes putting me on “probation” and given time to “fix” the problem.

Comment by GilaChess on July 14, 2007 @ 4:10 pm

Stop using ExaBytes and switch to DATAKL. Exabytes is for losers. I faced this same problem too with their stupid servers but when I moved to DataKL with EXACTLY the same setup, I never faced any problems since.

- MENJ

Comment by menj on July 15, 2007 @ 10:43 am

At the risk of looking spammy..

why don’t u use 1and1? it’s very cheap and reliable, but i’m not so sure how competitively priced it is in the malaysian market.

Comment by Chess Forum on July 15, 2007 @ 10:54 am

checked again. u get 10gb storage and 300gb bandwidth for only $24 (USD) for 6 months. many of my friends use it and never had a problem with them so far.

oh yeah. it’s based in the US. dunno if u’d rather have a hosting based in malaysia.

Comment by Chess Forum on July 15, 2007 @ 11:09 am

It is WP fault and I had that too. So I got no choice but to get myself a VPS which I can reboot on my own when the server hangs due to CPU overload. I had tried all the suggestions of WP Cache, don’t use widgets, don’t use too many unnecessary plugins etc but it is still the same. But then, my personal blog alone has 2300 posts so some of the plugins called up too many things each time. Do get it resolve cos once you get it, it will happen very often.

Comment by lilian on July 15, 2007 @ 11:34 am

Menj: I think you are right. There is something not quite right at Exabytes end for supporting Wordpress blogs. I wish their systems engineer would take a look. It should be something pretty simple to fix or adjust. Anyway, I’m looking at other sites like Bluehost, DataKL right now as possible solutions.

Lilian: You so rich can afford VPS account. I on the other hand cannot afford it .. Exabytes people suggested I upgrade to their Semi-D accounts where there are only 4 people sharing one webserver. But that’s about RM 200 plus per month.

Comment by GilaChess on July 17, 2007 @ 9:49 am

[...] Got closed down by Exabytes again. This time it was for CPU overload abuse and the website is my main chess website - http://www.GilaChess.com. I have been warned and my website temporarily disabled a few times before and after reducing my Wordpress plugins, I have been pretty confident that I’m not threading on broken glass. [...]

Pingback by More Exabyte woes on February 24, 2009 @ 12:12 am
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