HostingMatters appears to be having some sort of trouble, as OTB has been down the last couple hours and on only intermittently the last few minutes, and PoliBlog has had the same problem.
Can you tell when the site went down?
These things happen, but that doesn’t make it any less aggravating. (And, yes, I paid my bill!)
Update (1431): I just got the following note from HostingMatters:
Your site was consuming too much cpu time which is against our AUP and making the server completely unstable not only affecting your site but all of the other sites on that server. I suspended it so that our others on the site would not be affected by you. I have unsuspended it temporarily to see how it goes.
Considering that they didn’t bother to contact me first and that there’s no obvious reason why the site would be “consuming too much cpu time”– I’ve certainly had much higher traffic in recent months — I’ve gone from “aggravated” to really pissed off.
Update (1446): Much better now:
Apparently your postings about the most recent beheadings have landed you in the top spots for certain searches.
In any case, your site is going to be moved off [old server name] to a new server. I’ll be finishing the buildout of that box this afternoon or evening, and moving your site overnight.
Fair enough. I’ve gotten surges after beheadings before, although not this much since the Nick Berg incident back in May (where I had a whole lot more traffic). Since I’m not actually hosting videos or anything, I didn’t think it would have been that big a bandwidth drain. The only thing I can figure is that my category archive for “Hostage Beheadings” has itself gotten a lot of hits. But it only shows 15 posts at a time. Oh, well.
Update (1715): This would clear things up if I understood the techology involved:
This is not a matter of the number of visits or of bandwidth. It is a matter of the number of processes generated by those visits. The mySQL processes in particular that are attached to your account are creating the most problems at the moment.
I can wrap my head around the bandwidth concept but don’t understand this one. At any rate, they’re having to keep the site alive manually until they can move it to a new server this evening.
Update (1837): Another extended outage. The SiteMeter graph above has been updated to track this odyssey.
Update (1840): I was apparently “utilizing 492 of the 500 available mySQL connections.” How/why, I couldn’t tell you.
Update (1940): They’ve moved me to a new server. Hopefully, I won’t overwhelm that one.
