Hot Screensaver was down for a day due to resource spike
Dec 12th, 2007 by Neo
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What was supposedly a good Selangor public holiday turned out to be a nightmare. My blog Hot Screensaver was suspended and visitors including myself was greeted by the following message:
“We’re still here and have not gone anywhere. Please excuse the mess and check back shortly. Thank you! Webmaster: Contact support as soon as possible.”
So, there went my public holiday trying to get in touch with the hosting company in the US to find out what’s the cause of the suspension and how to get it fixed. They confirmed with me it’s due to resource spike because there are too much traffic to the site, CPU and memory usage were unusually high for the last few days.
I checked the extracted log which was sent my the hosting company and found that the traffic were actually normal, nothing suspicious except one IP address did a few continuous requests. Needless to say I immediately blocked that IP address in CPanel. However, it’s really difficult to open a raw log file which is more than 600MB… You have any suggestion how to troubleshoot hacking attempts?
Anyway, they have finally restored my account this morning. I am sure they are monitoring the site now… and if the problem persists, I will have to consider going VPS or get a dedicated server. While it’s every blogger’s dream to get tonnes of traffic, but the down side is we need a good server to support it.
Anyone wants to share my dedicated server? I will make sure you get large hard disk space, generous bandwidth and my personal support on setting up a nice blog! Price, don’t mention it, OK? 
Site feed
U’re getting famous, so perhaps someone jeles n wanna hack u! Hack him back!
Yeah.. I tried to go in but get errors..
BUT now is alright..
What’s a dedicated server?
oh I see..I thought you close shop ledi!
MonkeyWong,
It’s really difficult to check the log file. The raw access log file is 660MB big… opening it up is a huge task already. I tried it in UltraEdit (a text editor), and it didn’t respond for a long time, I think it crashed. Anyway, my hosting company is working on this right now.
keeyit,
Do come back for more.
Che-Cheh,
A dedicated server is a server where you own all the resources of the server. You don’t share with anybody else, so the server should be very stable and fast.
It’s different when you are on a normal hosting plan which costs RM100 or RM200 a year. This sort of hosting usually is shared server, where you are sharing resources with 200 or even 500 users/websites. If someone screwed the server, your website will be affected.
wuching,
Touch wood, touch wood!
LOL Your hosting and blog also need holiday oh
I am interested. How?
yalor…. i got that message also….
grad that its up again.
MerDuriaN,
Yupe, but I guess the worst is now over. I have a new hosting on a more solid server! You want to move to my server or not? Cheap cheap only but great and generous hard disk space and bandwidth!
Jam,
You sure? What about your current hosting? What are the specs you need?
Jellyfish,
Yupe, now should be up and running on the new server. However, since the domain propagation is not fully complete yet, the site may occasionally jump to the old server. But should stabilize within the next few hours or so.
Do you mind to share who’s is your hosting provider? Thanks.
Planet Lowyat,
Why, you are interested to switch host?