After 96 hours of downtime, kendrickcoleman.com is alive once again. This is my post-mortem of the experience and a little piece of my mind.
I woke up around 8am EST Saturday May 5th to see a tweet from @BasRaayman that said "Kenny, you might want to check with your hoster, your blog is stating "This Account Has Been Suspended"?". Great, what a fantastic way to start my Derby day. I look at my email and I see "WEB HOSTING ACCOUNT DEACTIVATED" in all caps.
Here are some snippets from the email:
Dear Kendrick:
It has come to our attention that your site is using an extreme amount of resources on our servers and network; consequently, your site has outgrown the Just Host shared hosting package. It has become increasingly more difficult to keep your site online, and doing so now degrades the experience for the other users on our servers. Others who have experienced such growth with their site(s) and hosting needs have chosen to move their site(s) to a Dedicated Server or Virtual Private Server (VPS). Just Host does not currently offer Dedicated or VPS hosting. These alternative hosting services will include more resources and site stability, as well as better backup and server redundancy.
Per conditions stated in our Terms of Service, we will no longer be hosting your account.
http://www.justhost.com/cgi/terms
7.02. Just Host employs complex mechanisms to protect its Subscribers and systems from abuse. Just Host's offering of "unlimited" services is not intended to allow the actions of a single or few Subscribers to unfairly or adversely impact the experience of other Subscribers. Just Host's service is a shared hosting service, which means that multiple Subscriber web sites are hosted from the same server and share server resources. Just Host's service is designed to meet the typical needs of small business and home business website Subscribers in the United States. It is NOT intended to support the sustained demand of large enterprises, internationally based businesses, or non-typical applications better suited to a dedicated server. Just Host will make every commercially reasonable effort to provide additional resources to Subscribers who are using their website(s) consistent with these Terms, including moving Subscribers to newer and bigger shared servers as necessary. However, in order to ensure a consistent and quality experience for all Subscribers, Just Host does place automated safeguards to protect against any one site growing too quickly and adversely impacting the system until Just Host can evaluate said sites resource needs.
We ask that you move your site(s) from our servers within 14 days, after which we will delete your site(s) from our hosting service.
....
As you probably aware, here at Just Host we proactively monitor all our servers to ensure that our clients websites are loading as fast as possible at all times. During this routine monitoring we have found that your account is utilizing an excessive amount of system resources, and we have been forced to suspend your site as per our terms and conditions.
For your reference, here is a copy of your usage report:
###
User Domain % CPU % MEM MySQL Processes
***** kendrickcoleman.com 14.79 1.44 1.4
Top Processes:
User ? Domain % CPU Process
***** kendrickcoleman.com 70.0 /usr/bin/php /home/*****/public_html/kendrickcoleman.com/index.php
***** kendrickcoleman.com 69.0 /usr/bin/php /home/*****/public_html/kendrickcoleman.com/index.php
###
Just Host offer unlimited hosting space and unlimited bandwidth, but as per our terms we must protect other users on this server and had to deactivate your account.
......
Thank you,
Justhost.com
888.755.7585
I was utterly shocked. I can't believe that they run a business like this. Instead of getting a courtesy email or a phone call, they just completely suspended the account and told me I had 14 days to pack my stuff and leave. I don't understand how anyone can sustain customer service in this manner. Thank God I don't have a business where I accept credit cards because I can see where one would sue for lost revenue. Believe me, I understand that things may get too big to host, but just pick up the phone and call me to give a heads up. I don't know where they get the boneheaded idea that it's just easier to completely shutdown the entire site without the administrator's knowledge.
To get the site back up, I had to call justhost and got transferred between 3 people to un-suspend the account so I could put up my maintenance page and start backing up the site. Over the past few months, I had opened up multiple tickets complaining of site lag and they were blaming it on their internal servers and said sorry we can't do anything until we upgrade our servers. I had been wanting to make the move for a while, and this was the last straw that broke the camels back. Instead of trying to deal with it, I made the move over to hostgator.com where the site is currently hosted under a shared package. The team at hostgator did a great job of moving the site, but things always don't go perfectly. If you see anything that might not be working, please email me at kendrickcoleman [@] gmail [d0t] com and I will address.
In the mean time, if you ever start a website/blog and are looking for a hosting provider, stay away from justhost.com
