1 year.

That’s about my average stay at any given hosting provider. I think it must be timed with hosting software product releases or something, because it’s actually pretty spooky… but it always seems like right around 1 year renewal is when I inevitably start looking for a new relationship. Like that car that ran great right up until a month after the warranty ran out… (and of course you didn’t get the extended warranty from the dealer!) … and then starts having electrical problems for the next 5 years you own it… such is my usual experience with hosting providers.

My friends say I’m lucky… that they don’t tend to hang out that long.

I could write a book about the challenges I’ve had with hosting providers, and no… I can’t (won’t) recommend any of them. Finding a good hosting provider is a lot like finding a good spouse… hopefully before you commit you’ve found most of the warts… and either way it’s really your choice if you can live with them or not.

My current hosting provider, BlueHost … has been wonderful for the last year, though i really couldn’t tell you how much downtime i’ve had because i refuse to host my email or domain with them (or any other host for that matter), and i am not so anal (or vain) to monitor my own personal blog site. But… my site has been up anytime i’ve needed it, and the few people who have gone to it over the last year have not ever complained that it was unavailable… so for my small needs here… i’ve been satisfied.

Until today.

I just got done writing an article about Real Estate Auctions… and then went to visit my site to see the article there… all new and shiny… and i was greeted with:

SUSPENDED - This site has exceed CPU usage limits… blah blah blah…

The feeling I got was similar (i’m sure) to the feeling that someone gets when they come home and find a ‘CONDEMNED’ notice on their door, and the windows boarded up. (though perhaps they may have seen it coming, whereas this notice certainly took me by surprise!)

I thought… ‘there must be a mistake! MY little site exceeding CPU usage? I’m my most frequent visitor!’ (thanks dad for the support! (my own mom doesn’t even come here!) *grin*

So… I headed over to the BlueHost website to initiate a support ticket, and found that I could actually talk with someone directly via chat! Awesome. Except… when I completed the form that is required prior to being able to pray with the hosting gods, I made the fatal mistake of choosing ‘CPU Usage Exceed Message’ as my ‘reason’ for initiating the chat. I was promptly redirected to a 20 page dissertation (maybe not 20 pages, but it was long) on how to resolve the issue myself. Now, I’m no neophyte … I’m actually a decent programmer… but my first thought was, If there is a problem, why can’t they just tell me what the problem is instead of making me go through all these hoops to find out myself? I backed up and changed my ‘reason’ to ’site unavailable’.

Enter ‘Isaac’.

I think I may have spoken with him before… but not sure. As I said… up to now i have had no issues with BlueHost. I had mentioned that nothing had changed on my server in over a year. Isaac pretty much treated me like my dentist did at my last visit… ‘When’s the last time you flossed?’ … Except Isaac said: ‘That’s probably why you’re having problems because you have never maintained your MySql database… you need to ‘fix’ your databases’. Playing dumb… my answer was … ‘I’m a neophyte… how am I supposed to know that I’m even suposed to maintain my databases?’… Issac: ‘You probably need to hire a professional.’ Here’s the thing Isaac… I thought I was talking to one!

I guess it’s sort of like changing the oil in your car… if no-one ever told you that you needed to… would you ever?

Well… It wasn’t until after closer inspection that I really got upset here. As I’m hunting through log files … I noticed that there was only one log file for CPU Exceeded messages… I asked Isaac: ‘So is this a new ‘feature’, or can I assume that since there is only one log file with one entry… this is the only time that this has ever happened with my site?’ … Isaac responded saying that it wasn’t a new feature… and that I was safe to assume.’

So this is what pisses me off… 1 year… a site with VERY low volume… (as I said… I’m my site’s most frequent visitor!) … and apparently what triggered this was a SINGLE 2 second query. That’s right… a single query in one year that took longer than 2 seconds to process… and instead of just killing the query and letting me know what happened… cpanel suspends my site. turns it off. Now… before you go saying ‘well that’s cpanel’s fault’ … BlueHost made the choice to turn on the thresh-hold (it’s optional, and adjustable), and they made the choice to use Cpanel in the first place… so …

My thinking is… first off… before you go suspending a site, you need to notify the user and let them know that there is a potential issue. I wasn’t even notified. I never would have been notified had it not been me seeing the suspension notice! My site would have sat there dead until I came back around and submitted another article, or until one of the very few visitors to my site actually notified me.

Secondly… before even considering it a Gawd Awful emergency that (OH MY GOD!) a query takes 2 seconds to process… they should consider the trend of 1 year’s worth in usage and think… hmmmm… maybe this is a fluke?

I really hope I don’t start having issues with my hosting provider. The last time I had issues with my hosting provider… I started my own hosting company, which I sold last year after running it for 5 years.