Some clients on business2.bigwetfish.co.uk will have noticed server load spikes the past 3 days. Unfortunately there was one user on this server who was running a Wordpress Website which had 40 active plugins and a cron job that was running out of control. This client also informed us she had a development team testing some new things on the account. Whatever they / the client have been doing it is far too CPU intense for a shared server.
If you are one of the other clients hosted on this business shared server you will want to know what we did to ensure your website stays on line and is not affected by one other user.
Here is what we did to resolve this issue for all affected clients including the client whose website was causing the issue. It is critical to note we do not just leave the client with a suspended website. We are a hosting company and we are not in the business of suspending client websites. We only suspend websites as an absolute last resort and as you can see in this case the client only had no website for a few hours while we moved it to a private server.
Where we are faced with such situations we do our best to make sure a client is not left without a website but in this case the site clearly is too busy for a shared business server so we suspended the site immediately to ensure other sites for other clients were able to start working properly;
We built the client a temporary private VPS server for 15 days as a courtesy and we moved the site to this VPS server;
We redirected the DNS so the site now loads from the private server this means the site will not affect any other users;
We suspended the account on the business2 shared server - the client's website is now on line still;
We informed the client they needed to either (1) Clear the offending plugins and cron, (2) Move to another provider and we would provide a backup or (3) Start paying for the VPS server after 15 days
We will continue to monitor this server closely for the next while.
