Dreamhost took my WP site down.. any clue?

podz, i do agree with you.
I was with terri from support and even when she replied every mail i’ve sent; i didnt get any strong proof of my “cpu usage increase” and since they didnt generated my website stats for that day.. i still got NO idea of what happened…

I mean, it might be one big site linking to me, or some script kiddie trying to take down my site… but i dont have to info to know what really happened :S

brainwidth they put taht directory only if you are on a testing server… like myself :S

Byt you know? the results of that “.pl” are the ones i showed in my last reply.. some kind of cripto stuff for me (ok, i might recognize i dont know too much about that) but they should have put something simpler!

To disable pingbacks:

1. wp-admin/options

uncheck the “allow pingbacks and trackbacks” option

2. manage/edit

on all posts and pages you want to uncheck the allow pingbacks checkbox and resave your posts/pages

that should help with some things.

install the following plugins:
badbehavior
spamminator

those should help too.

and take a look at this for more insight and options into blocking all sorts of bs.

The last time something like this happened, it was related to a recent comment listing plugin that was creating an inifite loop. If you can, and haven’t already, try disabling “brian latest comments”.

It seems that the admin on server watch duty disabled his domain for a couple hours while she moved him to a different server. It isn’t usual practice to turn off a domain when moving it so we have credited him a months worth of service, now. It seems that he has a fairly large archive section [https://www.uberbin.net/archivos/] and he was linked to by a large newspaper yesterday that caused the resource usage spike.

—

I’ll give you a rundown of the DreamHost usage policy as well. If a customer’s site begins taking a large amount of resources to the point where it affects the stability of the machine its on, we move it to evaluation server. The evaluation server is a place where the customer can work on optimizing their code without affecting as many other users.

The primary tool we use for evaluating processor usage is linux process accounting. This gives a breakdown by script name of the users cpu time used. Most often small optimizations are enough to get the resource usage under control.

—

DreamHost is a well respected company and has always been decent. We have common users with WordPress and more importantly a common interest in open source software with the creators and users of WordPress. Any general indictment of DreamHost is unwarranted and counter productive. No need to fight with your obvious allies and friends.

Thanks for the additional information, michaelndn. It’s great to know that Dreamhost has made good by offering the credit. However, I do have one small quibble. You wrote that there is “[n]o need to fight with your obvious allies and friends.” Dreamhost is a service provider, not my ally, and not my friend. In turn, I am not an ally or friend of Dreamhost, I am a client. Clients deserve and require a certain level of service, and in exchange, clients pay the provider of that service a fee. I appreciate that Dreamhost supports open source software, but I expect proper service regardless.

Well I was referring to the WordPress project and DreamHost as obvious allies. Do you as a customer have a specific case where you have not recieved proper service from DreamHost? I am not able to find any evidence of issues with your service, but if you were to point one out I would be very quick to resolve it.

DreamHost is not just random service provider Q, it is group of people. I can tell you that DreamHost is made up of a growing number of hard working, intelligent, and interesting people. And I am sure that many of our long-term customers will tell you that we don’t treat our customers as anonymous purchasers of a service commodity.

I do think that like any growing company we have had growing pains. And we have definitely been growing at a hair raising pace this year. (see [dailychanges.com] for a list of the fastest growing dns providers each day.) We have been in the top 20-50 in the world all year.

What I can assure you is that the technical team and infrastructure are in place to continue to optimize and scale what amounts to a very large software system. And what I can also assure you is that we want our customers, the people who we do business with, to be happy and to have their websites prosper. In that vain please bring any problems you have to our attention and we will assist you.

Friends are where you find them, and you will be hard pressed to find a better friend then DreamHost.

Actually, I don’t have any complaints at all. I’ve been with Dreamhost for a few months now, and I’ve had no problems. I’m also pleased that you don’t view your clients as “anonymous purchasers of a service commodity,” but don’t let that make you think that clients don’t expect the requisite amount of service.

As a lawyer, I’m a provider of services, too. My clients, many of whom have become friends, and all of whom certainly look at me as an ally when I represent them in litigation, still expect me to provide them with top notch legal services. If I didn’t, they would hire a different lawyer, friendship notwithstanding.

The same is true of hosting providers. I, and many others, are genuinely pleased that Dreamhost supports open source projects (particularly WordPress), and I am genuinely satisfied with your service. But that’s not to say that I wouldn’t change hosts if, for whatever reason, the quality of the service declined significantly.

Thanks for your input, and thanks for your willingness to talk directly with your customers. It’s very refreshing.

michael –

Thanks for stopping by, and letting us all in on what the ‘Dreamhost Process’ normally is, and that this was an abnormality in handling. I think we all agree we’d like to discover what scripts (parts of WP, plugins, whatever) are causing his particular over-usage issues, and frankly I’d love to see us have a wp-hosts mailing list where the support folks and wp-devs (and secondary devs) can discuss improvements.

Thanks again,

-d

When I had a similar problem with my apache server consuming over 95% of the CPU, my hosting provider simply restarted the virtual machine (I am on a VPS) with Apache and all. They said that such problems are often fixed by restarting the server. Restarting the entire virtual machine takes about 2 seconds and you are done.
And true to their understanding it hasn’t happened since. I didn’t change anything and I have tons of plugins running.

BTW: In that particular scenario only the WP processes were hanging, the rest of php based systems were ok.

It is not fair to bring down the host for such minor issues. It seriously undermines the credibility of the hosting provider IMHO.

Michaelndn, many many thanks for stoping by… as you might know, im “that” customer… and I’m not unhappy with DH. until yesterday i refered many people, not only for the money (which already cover my hosting bills for the next year) but for the fairly good prices and service I received in the last 2 years with you.

However, and even when you credited my account and Terri was extremely responsive, i felt really lost with the kind of stats you provided me, Ok, i’m not the usual PHP genius that you can find here… just a blogger ??

I was more worried than you regarding my performance problems, despite the fact that i use a shared server and resources so i might be hoging other users resources, i couldnt get any single indication of what was wrong until 30hours later. I did get a big picture “your scritps are taking down our performance” but nothing else.

I repeat, in the last 2 years i only had 2 issues with DH and you responded quickly so I was the typical happy customer.. but in the last 2 days i become a lost customer in every sense of the word.

Since i didnt get any stats of that day (and still dont have the stats for that day.. strange because i have the previous and next day stats in place) and since the link you provided didnt give a detailed explanation on where the problem where.. i had to start trying to solve that issue on a try-error basis.
I f I had only the chance to realize that the problem where in /archivos/ and in the PS3 specs page i could come earlier with a solution to that problem.

I mean, i will still recomend DH if you ask me, but with that incident in mind… Please dont take this as some kind of personal attack it is just my feelings about this problem.

But you know, I wasnt trying to “undermine the credibility of DH” i was jus ttrying to keep my sites online and this is the place to get help ??

Whew! It’s refreshing to see that this is a WordPress Problem — I’m on Dreamhost– I was recently slashdotted like 52 days ago and put on a test server– my usage went back down, but on Friday I got linked by penny-arcade.com and was back up to about 20,000 extra unique people cruising in a day, and like 100,000 page views a day extra— I just got another warning from Dreamhost this morning, and immediately did some searches online and found this.

I’m going to try disabling pingbacks and installig the badbehaviour plugin as well. I have no doubt my usage will go back down, but still, this is worrysome to me since I run a daily webcomic and have paying users on there as well. I’m going to send an e-mail to my tech support folk and let them know all of this as well. Dreamhost has been nothing but good to me. We’re gonna have to figure out this WP problem though… kinda sucks, WP is an awesome tool, but it seems to be causing too many troubles for Dreamhost according to what’s written here.

https://mnm.uib.es/gallir/posts/2005/11/10/499/

Dream host is a joke, 8%? Blue host allows 20% which I am having problems staying under right now, but all they do is time my site out with an info screen for a couple of minutes.