I’m finally back online after my site was down for approximately 20 hours. The hosting company (Anhosting/Midphase) pulled the plug on it, saying it was taking ‘too many resources’ off the shared server. I’m still not sure what that means or how my Wordpress blog would do that; they wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me what might have been happening or what (we) could do to fix it. The only option they could provide was to buy an expensive dedicated server, which was out of the question for me. It took more than 10 hours of wrangling before someone offered me another alternative.

Which is not to say that their tech support people weren’t helpful, depending on who I was talking to. Some guy early on really put a good effort, went beyond the call of duty to help me, but that produced nothing. You really can’t help but think that most of the tech support people, especially the ones answering phones or doing live chat, are (to quote one of them) “the bottom of the totem pole”, and really can’t do much of anything (except meet the company’s promise of 24hr tech support?).

Eventually, after 10 hours and talking/emailing some 5 different people, some kind tech support soul finally decided to come up with a solution, and I am grateful to THAT person. This didn’t get me back online untill another 10 hours had passed. I guess I am now moved to an ‘old’ server with PHP4 installed rather than PHP5; not sure what that means, but at least my site is back up.

I’m also not sure what to do next. I disabled all sorts of Wordpress plugins, most of which I was experimenting with and not doing anything useful really. I am now exploring solutions to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future.