Site & Hosting Issues

Well, the website seems to be back up after a few hours of downtime.

Not brilliant numbers…

I’m not very happy with my hosting provider as they have given me 49 outages in January this year… And seem to be trying to beat that for this month.

So in an effort to get the site back up I contacting my hosting provider support. 

They told me that there was nothing wrong with my website northwestonline.co.za… Which of course isn’t my website.

They also told me that I was using too much bandwidth (with 800 users a month and an average transfer of 1.47 GB/month I rather doubt that) and that my sql database was too big (91MB – hardly enormous) as well as telling me that I was using too much memory and had a high CPU usage on the site (which I can’t check personally, easily, but also rather doubt, because if they’ll lie or get confused about three things, why not five?).

Their solution to this issue was to try and sell me a Virtual Personal Server at about five times the going market rate. Which is, frankly, extortionate and ridiculous for what is essentially a tiny website in an indie author cul-de-sac of the internet, especially when I have two years of this service left before renewal.

Honestly, I think if it wasn’t for the spammers I’d hardly have any traffic at all, and certainly don’t require paying £35/month (not even dollars!) for what amounts to terrible service.

Of course there is a problem. 

They own my url of www.cjmoseley.co.uk so if I was going to change provider I’d also have to alter my url. Which would be a huge pain in the butt. So instead I have applied my years of web developer knowledge to the problem and fixed it for now.

I’ve disabled a few of my plug-ins and mucked about with my WordPress config to add a little memory slack in the system, which seems to have stabilized things, and should have been the first advice they offered me, instead of blaming me for the problem.

Maybe I should stop the Tumblr reblogs, so that this site is a smaller, leaner, cleaner site… Although I will continue the posts on Tumblr itself (and should link those posts directly to my facebook page)

That said, since I adjusted the configuration I seem to have a much more stable system again. So I’ll see if I can keep the site as is, for now, unless anyone has any brighter ideas, or can offer me some clever way of running the site another way, without doubling up my Hosting costs.

In other news, I’m still working on the 1st draft of “Cyberpixies”  which is now upto Chapter 23 and going well (although I need to edit the text down for kids as the reading difficulty is too high, but that’s what 2nd draft is for isn’t it?), and a 3rd draft of the Cthriller “With Stange Aeons Book1” (although that’s largely paused while I let one of my beta readers work through the text which is taking a long time as she’s finding it too frightening…). Although, I was going for Dan Brown writes Cthulhu I seem to have got more Stephen King instead, which might be better.

I’m still also still world-building the YA post-apocalyptic dystopian novel sequence “Adaption Files” as our ongoing T13 game at the moment (which is a lot of fun), and have started subtle plans for a Paradox War sequel series called “Paradox Warriors” – which is going to take a long time to build right.

Right, well with the website up and stable again, I better get on with some writing… Later folks.