June 17, 2007:

Site5 shut me down!

Sorry for no MINIsOnTop posts yet; when I got home my site was down - again! I emailed tech support and they said:
The IP to the site was blocked earlier in order to keep the server online:
66.246.254.189 (gbmini.net) -> 237 connections
237 connections is far over our 50 connection limit. I will remove the block but if the high resource usage continues, the block will be reinstated until the resource abuse stops

Well I’ve no idea what a “connection” is - someone looking at a web page? But I’m guessing with MINIsOnTop this weekend, and the recent Great Ice Cream Run, maybe more people than normal are checking out pictures … who knows, not me!

So I wrote back asking how to find where these “connections” come from and what I can do about them … they replied:
The connections were coming from many different IPs

So I can’t do anything about it, but if it happens they’ll kill my websites. Sweet, aren’t they! :(

You can guess that my time with Site5 will be short now …

Posted by GBMINI at 06:03 pm | Website/Hosting
Comments: 8 (post new comment)

  1. Josh Wardell (2007/06/17 @ 8:07 pm)

    50 connections is pretty unreasonable. I used to run that limit when running a server off of my own computer in college. A dedicated server should handle several hundred. And when that limit is reached, you should be given a simple “Too Many Connections” error page, not no response. Furthermore, on a shared server I’m not sure they can even tell which connections are specific for your site. I would request they raise that limit or threaten to leave. Unless it is something they added to the newer plans, I’ve never seen a connection limit mentioned in any of the hosting features/agreement.

  2. GadgetGav (2007/06/18 @ 5:57 am)

    I thought the whole point of paid hosting was to avoid things like that…
    When I got the ’server timed out’ error, I just assumed that Site% was down again, so it’s not good for them either.

  3. GBMINI (2007/06/19 @ 8:12 am)

    Down again this morning - I think because they shut it down again! :(
    Stats say daily bandwidth in June is 200MB, from 10,000 hits to 5000 pages - 1500 visits.

    No idea if that’s a lot or a little.

  4. =:¬) (2007/06/19 @ 9:15 am)

    thought of considering my host, never been down, BlueHost? The few times I needed help, while setting up Twisty, they were very responsive.

    http://www.bluehost.com/

  5. Ken (2007/06/22 @ 2:38 am)

    Have you been w/ Site5 for a while? Funny thing is that the same thing happened to me as well with Site5 this week–three days in a row!! I suspect something is up with WordPress/MySQL, but I’m not sure. Good luck.

  6. GBMINI (2007/06/22 @ 4:21 pm)

    More than a year - and they’ve majorly collapsed at least three times …

  7. Ken (2007/06/22 @ 4:41 pm)

    Yeah, this wasn’t the first time for me either. Usually they shut me down (i.e., IP block my site). I don’t do anything since I can’t figure out what the problem is (outside of upgrading WP if there’s another revision) and after they lift the block everything returns to normal for a few more months. This is the first time that I’ve been shut down back-to-back-to-back. I temporarily disabled my WP blogs and I haven’t gone down for a 4th day in row (yet). My unproven suspicion is that some bot is running around hitting my blogs too quickly.

  8. GBMINI (2007/06/23 @ 10:45 am)

    Likely, Ken - spambots looking to flood your weblog with comment spam. They don’t seem smart enough to realize (a) they’re not getting through and (b) I have “nofollow” active so the links don’t work for Google anyway!

    Go to your “awstats” and look at where the page hits are coming from - half of all Junes hits came from a single IP for me (so I blocked it)!

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