Got Terminated by Exabytes

[gilachess]

I have been a happy customer of Exabytes since 2004. I even gave good reviews of Exabytes when interviewed by The Star In Tech some time back when everybody was criticizing their local web hosting companies.

Today however I got a rude shock when a domain and webhosting (www.maribelajar.com) I just renewed March this year was suddenly suspended. My heart skipped a beat because I just quit my job to depend on blogging as my source of income. My Marbelajar.com is one of my main source of income.

I checked my email and there was nothing from Exabytes.

I called up Exabyte office and was put on hold for several minutes. Finally the person on the line told me he would call me back later.

20 minutes later I got a call from System Engineer HP Loh who told me that my website overloaded the shared hosting server. That was why it was suspended. She then told me she would email me the screenshot of the CPU overload.

Several minutes later, I got the email and it only showed 3 offending pages taking up 15% CPU resource. It was baffling as the two pages are from WordPress for my blog and Xoops for my CMS which is pretty standard scripts to use on most websites. I made sure I didn't have bad plugins or addons like forums or chatboxes that would suck up CPU resources.

I liked Exabytes because of the excellent service I got throughout. All my emails were promptly answered within the hour. The last time this happened was when I got hacked thru PHPBB and the hacker installed a script that was overusing CPU resources. The System Engineer just shut down the folder and made it inaccessible. He emailed me with detailed information and screenshot.
All I had to do was log in, remove the plugin form my admin page, delete the entire folder that hosted the script and everything went back to normal.

Today however, my account was suspended immediately without explanation.

This is certainly very stressful for me as I do not know what I did wrong as I certainly would not have installed anything that would overload the CPU. My website traffic isn't even high, about 100-120 visitors per day.

I've just emailed to the support of Exabytes but have not received any answers yet. I don't even know whether my website can be reinstated. My CPanel access is locked and now I have no idea what I can do.

I suspect this is the work of a DDOS like attack that targeted certain PHP scripts. If this is true then any customer of shared hosting can be a victim.
It's certainly sad as I am also hosting MalaysiaOpen.net - a chess festival sponsored by Dato Tan for the Merdeka celebrations on Exabytes. I don't know if the same thing will happen to the rest of my other websites hosted on Exabytes. Out of the blue my website is suddenly suspended.

What can I do now? Anybody else has the same experience?

[ujai.org]

i have experience a situation like yours before.. but not with exabytes though..
whenever i get the screen like yours, all i did was wait a few minutes and my web came back.. i dunno if it's the same with exabytes though..

if it's the same.. then u should not worry.. just wait a bit.. after a while it will be like normal.. if not then, wait for exabyte's staff to give more details and explanation..

[andy]

Hi Andrew,

Your site is found to be overloaded the CPU as you can see in the attachment which we have provided for you in the helpdesk. If the CPU consumption for a domain is not over the limit for a big gap, we will contact the user to notify them for a warning that their site is consuming a large amount of CPU usage. If there's shall be no response from the user, we will then proceed for the suspension of the account.

However, if the overloading of the resources is far beyond the scale we allowed, we will need to take pro-active action in suspending the account. As you may aware that your account is hosted on share hosting server, all the resources is being shared among all the users on the server. Imagine that if the domain which is overloading the resources belongs to other user and no action has been taken care, all the other domains including yours will be get affected in terms of the website loading performance, email, FTP...etc

I can see that you have given us a full co-operatin through the replies in the helpdesk. Please be rest-assure your issue is being taken care by one of our Senior Engineer and you should be receiving a reply shortly after this.

Once again, thanks for your full co-operation and support given to ExaBytes hosting services.

[mysticmind]

mine too.. has been suspended last month.
but i did not blame them since i knew it's their works to take care the server.
some said, 15% is just to low. more other server allow up to 30% cpu load..

but as long as i be with exabytes since years ago, i never had serious problem.

so what i need to do is optimize and check any wrong with my script..

anyway... just found another stupid thing = Yahoo Bot mass crawl in my site.. imagine that's about 200 yahoo slurp bot crawl in the background. It's not new case anyway.. after make some research.. most of forum has banned yahoo bot!

Phpbb? no.. never.. Dont use it!. Too many hole!

[Duddits]

ur site seems up now.. :-)

[ujai.org]

guess u got is solved already...
gratz dude..

[Kongtechnology]

Are you still hosted with exabytes? hehe

[gilachess]

Thanks Andy. I was already unsuspended (after 6 hours)

However I'm still worried as the measure taken like deleting plugins and even stopping an entire website (juditpolgar.maribelajar.com) on the same domain seems to satisfy Exabytes engineers but not me.

The reason is all the plugins seems harmless except perhaps the "Live" plugin I installed that shows live stats.

Maybe that's it. I hope

I did post a long rant about this on my blog.

[data_kl]

Originally Posted by gilachess

Thanks Andy. I was already unsuspended (after 6 hours)

However I'm still worried as the measure taken like deleting plugins and even stopping an entire website (juditpolgar.maribelajar.com) on the same domain seems to satisfy Exabytes engineers but not me.

The reason is all the plugins seems harmless except perhaps the "Live" plugin I installed that shows live stats.

Maybe that's it. I hope

I did post a long rant about this on my blog.

simple solution -

upgrade to dedicated server.
big forum is not suitable in shared environment.

it's quite difficult to be full-time blogger.
if big player like google , yahoo and other affiliate / pay-per click provider change their rules or commission - you are in trouble.
do not worry maybe blog should be your first step to be freelance web designer . who knows !

[fivio]

Hello,

Your website still within shared hosting level. There is no need for a rush upgrading to dedicated server.

1. Discuss with your provider so that both can get mutual benefit
2. Make sure you are in less congested server or properly maintained server.

Thank you,

[data_kl]

Next time - read TOS 1st before you buy.

[yonghs]

What's exactly the cause of the overloading of the CPU?? Wordpress? Forum? or Xoop? Or any particular plugin?

Please let us know so that we can avoid the same problem. Thanks.

PS: I'm Exabytes client too :| ...thinking of registering another new domain and implement Wordpress. Just 100 plus visititors a day and you got suspended..this is distressing news!

[data_kl]

High load - How does this happen

In Internet servers, High loads are caused by diverse reasons, each requiring a different approach for correction.

Power users

In a virtual hosting environment, there are many users who use the servers for maintaining websites. Some websites are simple, and some are Processor hungry, bandwidth hungry eCommerce applications. If you or your clients have big ecommerce sites with a lot of visitors, your load may shoot up.

Many users have Database driven sites. When such sites have lot of visitors, the number of Database connections increases and results in high load.

Ideally an Internet server shouldn't have more than 300-400 small to medium websites. If any of these users turn out to be power hungry, they could destabilise all the other users operations by hogging all the resources.

Script kiddies and attacks

Many times high loads are caused because the server wasn't secure enough and got cracked. The cracker started running IRC scripts or eggdrops. Sometimes spamming could be reason.

In some cases, a valid user turns into a monster and starts illegally abusing the system by spamming or running insecure scripts.

The first indication of a problem is high load. That should give the server administrator enough hints that something is wrong somewhere.

Run ``top'' on *Nix systems to see which processes are causing the load. Kill such processes and check out where they originated from. You may discover that something is up. Be suspicious about anything that you see that is causing load.

Running backup on the server, daily stats, server tasks

Sometimes high load is caused due to valid maintenance tasks such as Daily Backups, Daily stats updates and Cron schedulers. It is normal that the server loads shoot up during these times. There is nothing to worry during this time, provided that high load doesn't sustain for long. Therefore schedule such tasks during non Business hours when the users are minimum and therefore less likely to be affected.

Overselling

Irresponsible Overselling by Web Hosts is a major reason why web Hosts have Server load problems. In overselling what happens is that the web host sells more resources(like space, bandwidth) than is present. The Web Host assumes that all users are not going to be using the space or bandwidth they purchased. For example, the government builds roads thinking that all the people aren't going to use them at the same time. If the entire population were to step out of their houses, the roads would be totally inadequate.

Overselling is not all that bad, provided the Web Host is responsible in checking server load and acting upon it. Even if a Web host decides to oversell, the load has to be constantly monitored 24/7. If it reaches 2 or 3 fairly regularly, maybe it is time to move some websites to new servers.

[yonghs]

Thanks for info.

Anyway, I'm still baffled by the suspension by Exabytes as gilachess mentioned that it was caused by 2 Wordpress pages (a lowly 100 visitors a day and no forum). It seems ridiculous.... I have been running database driven sites for years and have always avoided forums and other resource hogs like Drupal on shared hosting but did not know that such a light app like Wordpress with low visitors can cause problems. That's y I requested gilachess or Exabytes to explain the exact cause.

I've been playing around with Wordpress(on localhost) and it seems to be a light and reliable script(the default installation) .... As I plan to register a domain for a Wordpress blog site (no forums and no plugins planned), I really hope to hear some explanation.

[gilachess]

Yeah I'm just as baffled as you are.

How can a WordPress overload the server. But from what I hear from 5xmom.com she has had that experience too running on her own VPS server. However, she has at least 20-30x more traffic than I do.

Under the shared hosting account I have no access to any tools that can pinpoint what caused the CPU overload

Right now, my own website is unavailable daily at certain times of the day. 5-15 minutes outages. I dare not even complain to Exabyte support (like I usially do) now because I feel the finger pointing will come back to me again and I get suspended once more.

I wish I can migrate to slightly better shared hosting like their e-biz account. I have another website with that account and the congestion or outages never happen there (or at least I've never seen it). But I've already paid for the year.