Nothing is more disconcerting than logging in and seeing your website has been suspended.

This happened to me yesterday on my www.maribelajar.com domain. This is the second time this has happened. That domain is hosted on Exabytes EBiz1 shared hosting package that costs RM 199 per year. It’s cheap and therein lies the problem with shared hosting. It is the most popular options for people to host their own website. If one person overuses resources such as CPU or database processing, it will affect other websites hosted on that same shared server.

My website was hosted on the Penang server which I can assume to be one of the earlier servers Exabytes has. Anyway here’s what Exabytes emailed me after the suspension:-

Hello Andrew,

Please be informed that your domain “maribelajar.com” which is hosted under our Penang Linux shared hosting server is found overloading the CPU resources via mySQL queries on the server.

You are required to check and optimize your scripts. Besides, you are advice to consider switching to Semi dedicated server if you required better performance to host your website. For more information, you may visit this link:

http://exabytes.com.my/products/hosting/linux/

If we continue found the domain exhausting the CPU resources, action will be taken to suspend the domain on the server without further notification being sent as outlined by hosting policy http://www.exabytes.com/about/legal/aup/#H-resource

We hereby attached a screen shot of the CPU usage of your domain on the server for your reference. Your attention on this issue is highly appreciated. Please reply to this ticket with explanation as soon as possible to avoid any interruption of service.

If you have any enquiries, please do not hesitate to contact. Thank you.

Best Regards,

KS Lim
………………………………..
System Engineer (Level 2),
Exa Bytes Network Sdn Bhd

Luck of where you are hosted
I checked thru the logs and apparently most of the MySQL queries came from my XOOPS hosted website. I certainly did not install CPU hogging scripts like chat, forum etc and furthermore, my traffic is only 10-20 visitors daily. I have another different website also hosted on Exabytes with the exact same setup but with about 20 times more visitors. The funny thing is, that site has no problem whatsoever. So it also depends on your luck whether you are on a shared hosting where everybody ‘plays nice’ or you can be very unlucky where there is one or two sites that suck up all the bandwidth on that server.

Too many spiders?
At the webmastermalaysia forums someone suggested that traffic may be coming in from search engine spidering my website. So today I wiped that website clean and plan to convert the contents to be hosted on WordPress with WP-Cache to lighten the load on the database. I also plan to put in a robots.txt to reduce the number of spiders.

Solution
I cannot afford to upgrade to the Semi dedicated server as suggested in the email because that costs RM 299/month + RM 100 setup fee. The eBiz Gold is more reasonable at RM 399 per year. I am considering the Gold package as that will at least move me away from the old problematic server (hopefully). I’m banking that there are more ‘cheapskates’ like me that will stay at RM 199 servers than move on to the RM 399 ones.

I know I’ve been adviced that the Gold package is still shared hosting and will not solve my problem but I do have a eBiz Gold account where I’m sure the CPU usage is much higher but the websites hosted there are quite fast. I truly suspect that my maribelajar.com websites were unlucky as at that time the CPU resources they used just ‘broke the camel’s back’ in addition to the other heavier loads put up by other people’s websites.

In the meantime..
I’ve already emailed Exabytes sales department asking them the cost of ‘upgrading’ my current package to Gold and also waiting for the support to reinstate my website. I’ve already removed the entire website that they pointed as hogging the CPU resources.

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