When .39 can close down a blog

For anyone who reads the WinExtra blog will know that for the last week I have been battling a hosting problem where apparently the site was using way to many resources on the shared hosting server and my host; not being too happy about this, moved the site to a non-production server. the email I got from them told me that either I had to get the problem under control or upgrade to a dedicated service and that I had three days to do so or they would shut the site down.

Once I got over the initial “WTF” moment I disabled the two newest plugins I had installed thinking that maybe one or both of them were the cause of the problem and got on the phone to support. After about ten minutes on hold I got told that it hadn’t made any difference.Now I was totally confused because the same basic installation had been running for the better part of a year without a single problem and when I asked the hosting support for some clue as to what could be the problem I was informed that because it was a script causing the problem they wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the culprit.

For the next three days I kept pulling plugins and contacting support only to be told that while it was creeping down it still wasn’t good enough. Now during this I had been dealing with support over the phone with people who didn’t even know what WordPress was but in general tried to be as helpful as possible. Then the second last tech guy I talked to did in fact know what WordPress was and actually took two seconds to look at the site and agreed with me that there was nothing there that could be causing the problem.

At this point the resource usage had been to within .39 percentage points of the site being returned to its home server and I was still in the dark as to what was the root problem. Then I remember that WordPress had released a new build (2.2.1) that was suppose to fix some security issues and since the tech; who actually knew what WordPress was, and I pretty well agreed that about the only thing left was the site being hit through a vulnerability I proceed to upgrade all the blogs to the new release.

After notifying the host of this I waited to see if that .39 had finally been beaten into submission. Then yesterday I got the email notifying that by their latest check everything was back to normal but they would be monitoring for the next 24hrs to make sure.

At this point I am not sure if the site has been returned to its home server or not  as I haven’t received any follow-up emails to let me know. In the meantime though as you can see I have updated the site with a new theme which still needs a little tweaking which I will work on through today. Not to mention getting caught up with my posts and slowly activating the most necessary plugins.

I’d like to say that the experiences of the past week has been a learning one but other than realizing the importance of maintaining security related upgrades it has been nothing more than a frustrating one. Hopefully though the problem is fixed and I can get back to being a cranky old fart.